Dennis Shasha New York University

1. July 28th, 2005 12:30 PM (Eastern),Building 105 Auditorium 9:30 AM (Pacific),A&E Executive Board Room, 3rd Flr. Bicomputational Puzzles Presented by the Distinguished Lecturer Series Bringing eminent speakers to Xerox from academia and industry. ABSTRACT I solve puzzles for a living. Over the last few years, I've tried to make this activity useful to biologists and scientists in general. This talk will give an overview of some of those attempts, involving the use of combinatorial design to reduce the size of experimental search spaces, machine learning to locate transcription factor-motif marriages, and visualization of experimental data. I will attempt to convey the ideas and show the tools rather than focus on mathematical details. BIOGRAPHY Dennis Shasha is a professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of NYU where he works with biologists on pattern discovery for microarrays, combinatorial design, and network inference; and with physicists and financial people on algorithms for time series. Other areas of interest include database tuning, tree and graph matching, and cryptographic file systems. Because he likes to type, he has written four books of puzzles, a biography about great computer scientists, and technical books about database tuning, biological pattern recognition and time series. He also writes the puzzle columns for Scientific American and Dr. Dobb's Journal (www.sciam.comwww.ddj.com search for Shasha). After graduating from Yale in 1977, he worked for IBM designing circuits and microcode for the 3090. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1984. Dennis Shasha New York University