Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquia Spring 2005
New techniques for large-scale phylogeny

Tandy Warnow
The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard
The University of Texas at Austin

Date:Feb 07, 2005
Talk:12:00pm, 366 West Village H

Abstract

The Tree of Life initiative -- to reconstruct the evolutionary history of all organisms -- is the computational grand challenge of evolutionary biology.

Current methods are limited to problems several orders of magnitude smaller and also fail to provide sufficient accuracy at the high end of their range.

The Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research (CIPRes) project, recently funded by a $11.6M Information Technology Grant from the NSF, funds 33 investigators from 13 institutions, to help develop the computational infrastructure for evolutionary biologists so that they can analyze large datasets. The group contains biologists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists, working together to formulate more meaningful stochastic models of sequence and genome evolution, to develop novel algorithms to analyze large datasets, and to develop novel database technology appropriate for phylogeny reconstruction.

In this talk, I will describe the activity in the CIPRES project, and show progress my group is making towards enabling highly accurate phylogenetic analyses of large datasets under the major NP-hard optimization problems, Maximum Parsimony and Maximum Likelihood. Our current techniques are able to analyze datasets containing thousands of taxa much faster than the current best methods available.

Biography

Tandy Warnow is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research combines mathematics, computer science, and statistics to develop improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in both biology and historical linguistics. She is on the board of directors of the International Society for Computational Biology, and previously was the Co-Director of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Texas at Austin. Tandy received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering in 1996. She is currently focusing her efforts on the CIPRES Project (www.phylo.org, Cyber-Infrastructure for Phylogenetic Research), which is an NSF-funded project to help build a national computational infrastructure for large-scale phylogenetic reconstruction.