Presentation
The immune system detects and responds to disease with unparalleled speed and precision. Increased understanding of its functioning may thus inspire novel diagnostics and therapeutics. In the UiO:Life Science convergence environment ImmunoLingo, we are combining ideas from multiple fields to shed light on the age-old question of how immune cells recognize foreign threats to the body.
In the talk, Victor Greiff will introduce how the immune system mounts a response to foreign threats, Geir Kjetil Sandve will show how we formulate and approach immune recognition as a machine learning problem, Ingrid Hob?k Haff will explain why we are particularly interested in high-order statistical interactions, and Mai Ha Vu will discuss how we draw inspiration from natural language processing and linguistics to learn useful representations for our biological sequences.
Speakers
Geir Kjetil Sandve is a Professor in the Biomedical Informatics Research Group (Department of Informatics, UiO). His research is focused on development of machine learning methodology to learn sequence patterns in immune cells indicative of disease. Sandve also leads the Sandve Lab, where they develop algorithms, tools, statistical methodology and machine learning approaches within omics and adaptive immunity.
Victor Greiff is part of the Department of Immunology (UiO) as an Associate Professor. In 2018, he started the research group Greiff Lab. There, they develop computational and experimental tools to decipher, read, predict and re-engineer antibody and T-cell repertoires with the aim to develop fundamentally novel immunodiagnostics, vaccines and immunotherapeutics.
Ingrid Hob?k Haff is an Associate Professor in Insurance Mathematics and Statistics (Department of Mathematics, UiO). Her academic interests include multivariate statistics, skew and heavy-tailed distributions, and applications within insurance and finance.
Mai Ha Vu is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies (UiO). She is involved with the ImmunoLingo Environment, an interdisciplinary collaboration between immunology, machine learning, statistics and linguistics. Her main interests lie in the intersection Theoretical Linguistics, Computational/Mathematical Linguistics, and Typology.
Program
11:45 – Doors open and lunch is served
12:00 – "Deciphering the Immune System Through Linguistics-Inspired Statistical Machine Learning" by Geir Kjetil Sandve, Victor Greiff, Ingrid Hob?k Haff and Mai Ha Vu
13:00 – Mingling (and goodbye)
To participate, please fill out the registration form. This way, we will not be short on food and drinks! (Registration is not binding and you are welcome to join us anyway!)
About the seminar series
Once a month, dScience will invite you to join us for lunch, soft drinks and professional talks at the Science Library. In addition to these, we will serve lunch to PhD candidates in our lounge in Kristine Bonnevies hus every Thursday. Due to limited space (40 people), this will be first come, first served. See how to find us here (download).
Our lounge can also be booked by PhDs and Postdocs on a regular basis, whether it is for a meeting or just to hang out – we have fresh coffee all day long! Read more about the series and the upcoming program here.