Prof. Andrew E. Teschendorff

Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Andrew Teschendorff studied Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh (1990-1995) under the supervision of Physics Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs. In 2000 he obtained a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University. In 2003 he became a Senior Research Fellow in Statistical Cancer Genomics at the University of Cambridge. In 2008 he moved to the University College London (UCL) Cancer Institute to work in Statistical Cancer Epigenomics and where he was awarded the Heller Research Fellowship. He currently holds an appointment as a PI at the CAS Shanghai Institute for Nutrition and Health, formerly a joint CAS-Max-Planck Partner Institute for Computational Biology, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Cancer Institute. Besides Statistical Cancer Epigenomics, his other research interests include Cancer System-omics & Systems Biology and Network Physics. He is an Associate Editor for various journals, notably Genome Biology, and a reviewer and statistical advisor for journals including Nature, NEJM and Science. He is the recipient of the Tait Medal and Robert Schlapp Prize in Physics, the Jennings Prize, Cambridge-MIT Initiative and Isaac Newton Trust Awards, a Wellcome Trust VIP Award, a CAS Visiting Professorship and a CAS-Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellowship. He holds various patents on algorithms for cancer risk prediction and cell-type deconvolution.

Speech Title: "Computational Dissection of Cell-Type Heterogeneity in Single-Cell and Bulk-Tissue Populations"

Abstract: In this talk, I will describe two computational methods we have developed to tackle challenges posed by cell-type heterogeneity, one at the bulk-tissue level and the other at single-cell resolution. Due to cost reasons, almost all biomedical DNA methylation data is generated at the bulk-tissue level. Thus, to draw inferences of DNA methylation changes at cell-type resolution requires cell-type deconvolution algorithms. I will describe our efforts to build a DNA methylation-atlas for arbitrary tissue-types, which, in conjunction with specific statistical algorithms, allows detection of cell-type specific DNA methylation signals in large-scale epigenome studies. I will highlight how we have used this DNA methylation atlas to reveal cell-of-origin and novel prognostic classes of various cancer-types. In the second part of the talk, I will describe a network-entropy based modelling approach for estimating stemness and differentiation potential from single-cell RNA-Seq data, and how it can be used to identify precancerous cells of high stemness and cancer-risk in the context of esophageal cancer development.

 

Prof. Tae-Seong Kim

Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea

Tae-Seong Kim received the B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1991, M.S. degrees in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering from USC in 1993 and 1998 respectively, and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from USC in 1999. After his postdoctoral work in Cognitive Sciences at the University of California at Irvine in 2000, he joined the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Dept. of Biomedical Engineering at USC as Research Scientist and Research Assistant Professor. In 2004, he moved to Kyung Hee University in Republic of Korea where he is currently Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His research interests have spanned various areas of biomedical imaging, bioelectromagnetism, neural engineering, and assistive lifecare technologies. Dr. Kim has been developing novel methodologies in the fields of signal and image processing, machine learning, pattern classification, and artificial intelligence. Lately Dr. Kim has started novel projects in the developments of smart robotics and machine vision with deep learning methodologies. Dr. Kim has published more than 380 papers and twelve international book chapters. He holds ten international and domestic patents and has received numerous best paper awards.

Speech Title: "Deep Learning Methodologies in Robot Intelligence for Natural Object Manipulation"

Abstract: In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), robot intelligence is an exciting interdisciplinary field that includes robotics, machine learning, pattern recognition, and visuomotor/sensorimotor controls. The aim of robot intelligence for grasping and manipulating objects is to achieve the dexterity of grasping and manipulation in humans. Recently, advancements in machine learning methods, particularly deep learning, have accelerated the growth of this new discipline, such that robots can learn to grasp and manipulate various objects autonomously, similarly to humans. In this talk, various deep learning and deep reinforcement learning methodologies for natural object manipulation with an anthropomorphic robot hand will be presented.

 

Prof. Shuang Wang

West China Hospital, Sichuan University, China

Dr. Shuang Wang is a professor at the Institutes for Systems Genetics, West China Hospital. He is also the Co-founder, President and CTO of NVXClouds. He was awarded the Overseas high-level young talents in 2018. He was an assistant professor at the School of medicine, University of California San Diego. He is the Founding Committee of International Homomorphic Encryption Standardization and the Vice President of Data Sharing and Security Branch of Sichuan Bioinformatics Society. He has also initiated several domestic and international privacy-preserving computing standards. He is also the co-founder of iDASH global privacy protection competition, which has been reported by Nature News and GenomeWeb. His research focuses on privacy-preserving computation such as federated learning, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), etc. He has published more than 100 research articles on data privacy. He received an outstanding achievement award due to his research on secure international genomic data analysis using TEE from Intel Corporation. As the PI or Co-I, he has participated in several NIH, PCORI, AHRQ grants for data privacy research with tens of millions USD support.

Speech Title: "Privacy-preserving Computation Empowered Medical Data Sharing and Collaboration"

Abstract: Healthcare big data is fostering a huge market, bringing technological advancement or value transformation. At the same time, there are new challenges that come with it: when individual’s healthcare data are brought together, it may become a "magic mirror", telling the master behind it, such as who are you, where are you, or even more secrets about you. Since you share a part of the common genomes with your immediate family member, the disclosure of your personal medical and genetic information may also have a negative impact on the privacy of them. Therefore, it is imperative to protect the privacy of biomedical big data. Sufficient protection is necessary to safeguard patient privacy and to increase public trust in healthcare research. In this presentation, we will first review the existing challenges of healthcare data privacy. Then, we will discuss both policies and technological solutions to regulate and safeguard healthcare data privacy, respectively. Regarding policy, we will cover the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in US, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in EU, and Network Security Law of the People's Republic of China. Regarding technological solutions, we will discuss data de-identification method under HIPAA and the risk assessment strategies of the HIPAA safe harbor rule based on large-scale Chinese healthcare data. Then, we will introduce homomorphic encryption, federated learning and differential privacy technologies for healthcare data privacy protection. More specifically, we will focus on the studies of privacy-preserving federated learning technologies in both structure and non-structure data under horizontal and/or vertical partition paradigms. Through this presentation, audience are able to become familiar with both regulatory and technological progresses in healthcare data privacy protection.

 

 

Prof. Shaomin Zhang

Zhejiang University, China

Dr. Shaomin Zhang is a senior researcher at Qiushi Academy for Advanced Studies, Zhejiang University. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees of Biomedical Engineering from Zhejiang University. He obtained his postdoc training at the Institute of Advanced Digital Technologies & Instrumentation, Zhejiang University and Brown Institute for Brain Science, Brown University. His research focuses on invasive brain-machine interface and non-invasive neuromodulation technology.

 

Speech Title: "Neural Activity Decoupling and Modulation Observed in Brain-Machine Interface Learning"

 

Abstract: In typical brain-machine interface (BMI) studies, the activities of the neuron population serve as direct input to the BMI decoder. In this study, we first trained the monkey to control the cursor to perform the center-out task smoothly with two direct units randomly selected. At the same time, we investigated how the direct units changed during BMI learning to explain how monkey learns to control the cursor. During training, these two direct units displayed a new activity pattern. They slowly changed their preferred directions until the angle between their preferred directions approached 90 degrees, which suggested that the direct units became independent of each other after BMI learning. We further investigated the activities of the neural population after the BMI learning with different numbers of direct units. We found that the direct units tended to enhance their encoding stability and increase neural modulations when the number of direct units decreased. The changes and differences observed in the neural activities in this study suggested that BMI learning could be achieved through the plasticity of the neural population.

 

Assoc. Prof. Suzaimah Ramli

National Defence University of Malaysia, Malaysia

Suzaimah Ramli received her PhD in Electrical, Electronic and System Engineering from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in 2011, Master of Computer Science from Universiti Putra Malaysia in 2001, and Bachelor of Information Technology (Hons) from Universiti Utara Malaysia in 1997. Her research interests include image processing and artificial intelligence applications in various domain particularly in education, digital media, security and defence. Currently she is working as an Associate Professor at Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Defence Science and Technology, National Defence University of Malaysia. She is a member of Malaysia Board of Technologist and Informatics Intelligence Special Interest Group, UPNM. She has published and presented most of her research findings to various international conferences and articles in many international journals specifically in her research niche.

 

Speech Title: "Optical Flow-based Algorithm Analyses to Detect Human Emotion from Eye Movement-Image Data"

 

Abstract: One of the popular methods for the recognition of human emotions such as happiness, sadness, and surprise is based on the deformation of facial features. Motion vectors that show these deformations can be specified by the optical flow. In this method, for detecting emotions, the resulted set of motion vectors is compared with a standard deformation template caused by human emotional changes. In this paper, a new method is introduced to compute the quantity of likeness to make decisions based on the importance of obtained vectors from an optical flow approach. The current study uses a feature point tracking technique separately applied to the five facial image regions (eyebrows, eyes, and mouth) to capture basic emotions. Moreover, this research will be focusing on eye movement regions. For finding the vectors, one of the efficient optical flow methods is using the pre-experiment as explained further below.