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events:individual_past_events:2009-10-13_tiffani_williams [2009/10/20 11:52]
 events:individual_past_events:2009-10-13_tiffani_williams [2009/10/20 11:52] (current)
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 +/* If you have not already done so, please begin the heading below 
 +   with a date in YYYY-MM-DD format followed by a short description.
 +   This is what will appear in the event listing and the event list 
 +   itself is sorted by this.   */
  
 +==== 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.