DSAA’2015 Keynote Speeches

A Web user today has his/her data and information distributed in a number of services that operate in silos. Computer wizards already know how to control their personal data to some extent. It is now becoming possible for everyone to do the same, and there are many advantages to doing so. Everyone should now be in a position to manage his/her personal information. Furthermore, we will argue that we should move towards personal knowledge bases and discuss advantages to do so. We will mention recent works around a datalog dialect, namely Webdamlog.

With the success of online social networks and microblogging platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, the phenomenon of influence-driven propagations, has recently attracted the interest of computer scientists, sociologists, information technologists, and marketing specialists. In this talk we will take a data mining perspective, discussing what (and how) can be learned from a social network and a database of traces of past propagations over the social network. Starting from one of the key problems in this area, i.e. the identification of influential users, we will provide a brief overview of our recent contributions in this area. We will expose the connection between the phenomenon of information propagation and the existence of communities in social network, and we will go deeper in this new research topic arising at the overlap of information propagation analysis and community detection.

Genome wide data reveal an intricate landscape where gene actions and interactions in diverse spatial areas are common both during development and in normal and abnormal tissues. Understanding local gene networks is thus key to developing treatments for human diseases. Given the size and complexity of recently available systematic spatial data, defining the biologically relevant spatial areas and modeling the corresponding local biological networks present an exciting and on-going challenge. It requires the integration of biology, statistics and computer science; that is, it requires data science.

In this talk, I present results from a current project co-led by biologist Erwin Frise from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) to answer the fundamental systems biology question in the talk title. My group (Siqi Wu, Antony Joseph, Karl Kumbier) collaborates with Dr. Erwin and other biologists (Ann Hommands) of Celniker's Lab at LBNL that generate the Drosophila spatial expression embryonic image data. We leverage our group's prior research experience from computational neuroscience to use appropriate ideas of statistical machine learning in order to create a novel image representation decomposing spatial data into building blocks (or principal patterns). These principal patterns provide an innovative and biologically meaningful approach for the interpretation and analysis of large complex spatial data. They are the basis for constructing local gene networks, and we have been able to reproduced almost all the links in the Nobel-prize winning (local) gap-gene network. In fact, Celniker's lab is running knock-out experiments to validate our predictions on gene-gene interactions. Moreover, to understand the decomposition algorithm of images, we have derived sufficient and almost necessary conditions for local identifiability of the algorithm in the noiseless and complete case. Finally, we are collaborating with Dr. Wei Xue from Tsinghua Univ to devise a scalable open software package to manage the acquisition and computation of imaged data, designed in a manner that will be usable by biologists and expandable by developers.