Richard Karp


Title of Presentation: Three Combinatorial Problems in Computational and Genomic Biology

CORS-INFORMS 2009

Toronto, Canada

Monday, June 15, 10:00am-10:50am

Metro Grande Centre, Conference Centre-Level 2


Abstract:

The quest to understand how living cells work requires the extraction of knowledge from large bodies of genomic and molecular data.This effort leads to large-scale combinatorial optimization problems that must be attacked by heuristic methods.We present such methods for three key problems:alignment of multiple genomes, discovery of functional protein modules from protein interaction data, and discovery of genetic interaction from natural genomic variation.This is joint work with colleagues at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and Tel Aviv University.

Bio

Richard M. Karp received a PhD from Harvard University in 1959. From 1959 to 1968 he was a member of the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM Research. From 1968 to 1994 and from 1999 to the present he has been a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the Class of 1939 Chair and is currently a University Professor. From 1988 to 1995 and 1999 to the present, he has been a Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. From 1995 to 1999 he was a Professor at the University of Washington. His honors and awards include, among others, the U.S. National Medal of Science, Turing Award, Kyoto Prize, Fulkerson Prize, Harvey Prize (Technion), Centennial Medal (Harvard), Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon), Lanchester Prize,Von Neumann Theory Prize,Von Neumann Lectureship,Babbage Prize,EATCS Award, Miller Research Professor (Berkeley), and SIGACT Distinguished Service Award. Dr. Karp is a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, the French Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, INFORMS and SIAM.