Plenary Lecture

Artificial Intelligence Methods in the Interpretation of Statistical Testing of Genes under Hypothetical Balancing Selection

Professor Krzysztof A. Cyran

Institute of Informatics,
Silesian Univ. of Technology,
Gliwice,
POLAND

Email: Krzysztof.Cyran@polsl.pl

Abstract: The detection of natural selection at the molecular level is one of the crucial problems in contemporary population genetics. There exists a number of statistical tests designed for it, however the interpretation of the outcomes is often obscure, because of the existence of factors like: population growth, migration and recombination. The author has proposed the multi-null methodology, and he applied it for four genes implicated in human familial cancer: ATM, RECQL, WRN and BLM. Because of high computational effort required for estimating critical values under nonclassical nulls, mentioned methodology is not appropriate for selection screening. Therefore, the author in this plenary lecture presents novel, artificial intelligence based methodology, helpful in the interpretation of the tests outcomes applied only versus classical null hypotheses. This method does not require long-lasting simulations and, as it is shown in a lecture, it gives reliable results. As examples of artficial intelligence methods the rough set theory and artificail neural networks are used in the aforementioned problem.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Krzysztof Cyran was born in 1968, in Cracow, Poland. He received MSc degree in computer science (1992) and PhD degree (with honours) in technical sciences with specialty in computer science (2000) from the Silesian University of Technology SUT, Gliwice, Poland. His PhD dissertation addresses the problem of image recognition with the use of computer generated holograms applied as ring-wedge detectors. In 2003-2004 he was a Visiting Scholar in Department of Statistics at Rice University in Houston, US. He is currently the Assistant Professor and the Vice-Head of the Institute of Informatics at SUT.

Dr Cyran has received several awards of the Rector of the SUT for his scientific achievements. In 2004-2005 he was a member of International Society for Computational Biology. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Biological Systems and a reviewer for Optoelectronic Review, Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering, and Studia Informatica.

He has been an author and co-author of more than 60 technical papers in journals (several of them indexed by Thomson Scientific) and conference proceedings, and has been involved in numerous statutory projects led at the Institute and some scientific grants awarded by the State Committee for Scientific Research. His current research interests are in image recognition and processing, artificial intelligence, digital circuits, decision support systems, rough sets, computational population genetics and bioinformatics.