Speaker: Dianbo Liu National University of Singapore
Time: 2023-11-27 14:00-2023-11-27 15:30
Venue: Tencent Meeting: 431 399 997)

Abstract:

Our team at National university of Singapore utilizes newest discovery from cognitive sciences especially consciousness related knowledge to inspire next generation of machine learning and apply the methods to understand biomedical sciences. In this talk we focus on using method inspired by compositional thoughts in human brain to discover causal relationships within Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs). Causal discovery in GRNs is a challenging problem for multiple reasons including the existence of cyclic feedback loops and uncertainty that yields diverse possible causal structures. Previous works in this area either ignore cyclic dynamics (assume acyclic structure) or struggle with scalability. We introduce Swift-DynGFN as a novel framework that enhances causal structure learning in GRNs while addressing scalability concerns. Specifically, Swift-DynGFN exploits gene-wise independence to boost parallelization and to lower computational cost. Experiments on real single-cell RNA velocity and synthetic GRN datasets showcase the advancement in learning causal structure in GRNs and scalability in larger systems.

Short Bio:

Dianbo Liu is leader of Cognitive AI for Science team (CogAI4SCI.com) and assistant professor at National University of Singapore. Before starting CogAI4Sci team, Dianbo Liu was a group leader at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Prior to the Broad Institute, Dianbo worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Yoshua Bengio (a Turing Award winner) and led the Humanitarian AI team at the Mila-Quebec AI Institute. This followed his fellowship training and studies in medical informatics at Harvard University. Dianbo earned his PhD from the University of Dundee, Scotland, under the supervision of Prof. Timothea Newman. During his doctoral studies, he received the Vest Scholarship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was a special graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Dianbo also co-founded two start-ups, "GeneTank" and "SecureAILabs," to advance AI applications in biomedical sciences during his training.