Sponsored by the Data Science Center, the purpose of the Data Science Seminar is to foster collaborations between the core Data Science faculty (CSE/ECE/STAT) and faculty from other sciences that face Data Science problems in their research. After the talk, there will be time for discussions.
The talk will be given by Prof. Adam Godzik, School of Medicine, UCR
TITLE:
How to survive Google taking over your research field and (perhaps) thrive
ABSTRACT:
Two years ago, Google team made an incredible advance in structural biology, practically solving the protein folding problem (predicting protein structure from its amino acid sequence). The AI-based AlphaFold algorithm was shown to produce protein models comparable in quality to the experimental ones. It shaked up the field of structural biology, which now must contend with having a choice between spending months on experimental structure determination, or pick up a ready AlphaFold model. However, while amazingly successful, AlphaFold doesn’t address several important questions about proteins, the main one being the existence of alternative conformations. Alphafold is based on the one sequence - one structure paradigm and ignores or rejects all information not compatible with this paradigm. In this seminar I want to highlight a possible path to use some of this information and seek collaborations with deep learning experts to use the computational tools from the AlphaFold infrastructure (or to invent new ones) to address some really fascinating questions in structural biology.
*** Pizza and refreshments will be provided! ***
