Physics Student Successes at Conferences

Congratulations to our students for their successes at these various conferences.

UofTAI (University of Toronto Artificial Intelligence)

Our students participated in the Project X competition. This year's theme was Health and our students competed in the Genetics category and won first prize! They also gave a presentation at this year's UofTAI conference held in February. Congratulations goes to Awini Altabaa, Ciaran Byles-Ho, David Huang, Hani Khatib, and Fabian Sosa.

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

The research paper that won the Project X competition, went on to win the "Best Student Paper" award at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IEEE CIBCB) held in Ottawa from Aug 15-17.

Paper title:

geneDRAGNN: Gene Disease Prioritization using Graph Neural Networks
Awini Altabaa (��˴�Ƭ), David Huang (��˴�Ƭ), Ciaran Byles-Ho (��˴�Ƭ), Hani Khatib (��˴�Ƭ), Fabian Sosa (��˴�Ƭ) and Ting Hu (��˴�Ƭ).

Abstract:

Many human diseases exhibit a complex genetic etiology impacted by various genes and proteins in a large network of interactions. The process of evaluating gene-disease associations through in-vivo experiments is both time-consuming and expensive. Thus, network-based computational methods capable of modeling the complex interplay between molecular components can lead to more targeted evaluation. In this paper, we propose and evaluate geneDRAGNN: a general data processing and machine learning methodology for exploiting information about gene- gene interaction networks for predicting gene-disease association. We demonstrate that information derived from the gene-gene interaction network can significantly improve the performance of gene- disease association prediction models. We apply this methodology to lung adenocarcinoma, a histological subtype of lung cancer. We identify new potential genes-disease associations and provide supportive evidence for the association through gene-set enrichment and literature based analysis.

2022 Canadian Astroparticle Summer Student Talk (CASST) Competition

Congratulations to the Queen's students who participated! Matt Marzano placed 4th, Ciaran Boyles-Ho placed 6th and Irena Babayan and Henry White received Honourable Mentions.

Below are some pictures from UofTAI and IEEE Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology conferences.

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