[Colloq] Talk, Monday, 12noon, 366 WVH

[Rachel Kalweit]

CCIS Colloquia Presents:
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.