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==== 2009-10-13 Asprey Lecture Tiffani Williams ====

===The Winifred Asprey Lecture Series in Computer Science===                                                                                                 
**Sponsored by the Department of Computer Science in honor of Winifred                                             
Asprey '38 Emeritus Professor of Computer Science**                                                                

Tiffani Williams, Texas A&M\\                                                                                      
Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 5pm \\                                                                                  
OLB, Computer Science 105 \\                                                                                       
Tea reception in Student Lounge at 4:30pm.\\                                                                       

=== Using the MapReduce Framework to Analyze Large Collections of Evolutionary Trees on Multi-Core Platforms ===                                                                       

Evolutionary trees represent the genealogical relationships among a                                              
collection of organisms.  Evolutionary trees have many benefits such                                             
as automating species identification, improving global agriculture,                                              
and understanding disease transmission. Current techniques to                                                    
reconstruct the evolutionary tree for a set of organisms can easily                                              
produce tens of thousands of potential candidate trees. How can we                                               
produce an accurate estimation of the true evolutionary history for                                              
the organisms under investigation from such a large collection of                                                
trees?

In this talk, I will discuss our MrsRF (MapReduce Speeds up RF)           
algorithm, which is a multi-core algorithm for computing the              
all-pairs Robinson-Foulds (RF) distance between evolutionary trees.       
The novelty of our algorithm lies in how we use the MapReduce             
framework, which has been popularized by Google, to compare tens of       
thousands of evolutionary trees quickly on multi-core platforms. The      
talk will conclude by describing applications that utilize our MrsRF      
algorithm in order to reconstruct accurate evolutionary trees.            

===Bio:===                                                                      
Tiffani L. Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of        
Computer Science at Texas A&M University. She earned her B.S. in          
computer science from Marquette University and Ph.D. in computer          
science from the University of Central Florida. Afterward, she was a      
postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico.  Her honors          
include a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan              
Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a McKnight Doctoral               
Fellowship.  Her research interests are in the areas of                   
bioinformatics and high-performance computing.