Computer Science 450 - Seminar in Computer Sci

Description: The topic changes from year to year. For fall 2014, the topic is "Computational Biology." This course examines the central computational challenges that have emerged since the publication of the human genome sequence in 2001. The enormous volume of genetic and genomic data collected by biologists has required the development of sophisticated computational techniques to analyze it. This course presents the formulation of these biological data analysis challenges as computational problems. Topics may include: de novo genome sequence assembly, sequence alignment, gene finding and motif discovery, analysis of genome rearrangements, phylogenetic tree reconstruction, and protein folding. The course emphasizes how these problems can be addressed using classical computational problem-solving paradigms, including: greedy techniques, dynamic programming, hidden Markov models, expectation-maximization, and combinatorial algorithms. Assignments will include both problem sets and programming projects.

Requisite:  COSC 121 and 201.  Fall semester.  Professor Valentine.