Communications of the ACM
Nmsu Professor Shows There's More to Computer Science Than Gaming Careers
NMSU computer science professor Joe Song, left, and doctoral student Yang Zhang show off their Best Performance certificate from the HPN-DREAM8 challenge.
Credit: Joe Song
New Mexico State University (NMSU) professor Joe Song studies computational biology and develops computational technology to advance quantitative understanding of life science problems. Song and doctoral student Yang Zhang recently participated in the Heritage Provider Network, a challenge that instructs researchers to develop software systems to help understand how abnormal cell proliferation leads to breast cancer. The NMSU researchers used real and computer-generated data to develop a software system to study biological systems. The work won first place in the challenge.
"Overall, our goal was to understand, at a molecular level, gene interaction; how cells divide and how they can cause tumor tissues to grow uncontrollably," Song says. "We want to know what genetic factors lead to this cell proliferation."
The researchers say their system can be applied to many different network scenarios. "There are many life science problems (such as treating HIV and breast cancer) that don't have a satisfactory solution yet," Zhang says. "With the power of computers, we are trying to approach those genetic markers that may reveal where a goldmine may be located."
From Las Cruces Sun-News (NM)
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