News
[Invited Talk] Embracing Noise in Bioinformatics (Dr. Chuan Hock Koh)
News Announcements Published March 18, 2014Date: 2014. 3. 24. (Wed) 1:00 pm ~ 2:30 pm
Venue: Oh Sang Soo Room, Bldg. E3-1, CS Dept., KAIST
Host: Prof. Jong C. Park
Speaker: Dr. Chuan Hock Koh, Rakuten, Inc., Japan (http://www.kohchuanhock.com/)
Title: Embracing Noise in Bioinformatics
Abstract:
In the classical view of biology, noise has a negative connotation
associated with it. Therefore, one would often attempt to remove
“noise” from data using various statistical methods before any
downstream analysis.
There exist two types of noise in biological data; viz., observation
noise and system noise. While observation noise is caused by
experimental and/or measurement errors, system noise is inherently
an important part of a biological system that allows it to evolve and
adapt to the ever-changing environment.
Unfortunately, distinguishing observation noise from cell variation is
a daunting task, and meaningful cell variation would be inadvertently
removed whenever one attempts to eliminate “noise”.
Therefore, the philosophy that is undertaken throughout my thesis
is acknowledging that noise is inherent in biological systems,
and embracing it. More specifically, by embracing noise, we mean
to accept that noise is an inherent and important part of biological
systems. Therefore, instead of trying to measure and remove them,
we propose alternative ways to reduce and suppress them.
Short bio:
Chuan Hock is a bioinformatician by training, and currently a data
scientist by profession in Rakuten Japan, the largest ecommerce
company in Japan. He received his PhD from the National University
of Singapore in 2013. During the course of his PhD, he spent two years
as a visiting graduate student in University of Tokyo. At the point of his
PhD submission, he has eleven peer-reviewed journal publications in
such as PNAS and Bioinformatics. In addition to biological data, he
has also worked with financial, social gaming, and most recently,
ebooks and ecommerce data.
If you don’t find him in front of a computer screen, you will probably
find him doing sports. He has competed in national and international
dragonboat races representing both his university and Singapore,
scaled mountains, and also completed an Ironman triathlon (which,
by the way, is one of the toughest triathlons on earth) that took him
15 hours.
