CSI 4106: About me

I earned my Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal, where I had the privilege of being mentored by Guy Lapalme, a researcher well-known internationally for his contributions to Natural Language Processing (NLP). Lapalme has been honoured with numerous awards for his work, including an honorary doctorate from the Université de Neuchâtel. He is also a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association in 2011 and from CS-Can in 2023, underscoring his significant impact in the field of artificial intelligence.

At the onset of my career, I applied symbolic computing techniques to predict the three-dimensional structure of ribonucleic acid (RNA) structures.

Transitioning from state-space-search, I shifted my focus towards machine learning, employing inductive logic programming (ILP) to study protein folding, the associations between transcription factor binding sites, and the synthesis of multi-modal genomic data. I was privileged to work with Stephen Muggleton, who is known for founding the field of Inductive Logic Programming, a subfield of symbolic artificial intelligence which uses logic programming to homogeneously represent background knowledge, examples, and hypotheses.

Together with my students, we developed pattern discovery algorithms that leverages suffix arrays and graphs, incorporating principles from statistics, information theory, and minimum description length encoding to assess and prioritize motifs. Additionally, we created algorithms based on multi-objective evolutionary computing to extract network expressions that represent DNA motifs.

Recently, we have embraced deep learning to tackle a range of challenges in bioinformatics. One aspect of our research involved devising an encoding method for RNAs that captures information about their secondary structures. Furthermore, we investigated how deep learning can be utilized to quantify the cell-type specificity of DNA signatures.

Other claims of fame.

• I had the opportunity to attend a talk for a small audience with John McCarthy, who coined the term Artificial Intelligence. If memory serves me well, this was a Workshop on Machine Intelligence in the UK, in 1997 or 1998.
• I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Marvin Minsky at Concordia University during my graduate studies.
• Samy Bengio, Senior Director, AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple, was my teaching assistant when I completed my undergraduate studies. Samy is also the brother of Yoshua Bengio, who was award the Turing price for this work on deep learning.