Digiteo - Recherche en sciences et technologies de l'information

Bioinformatics turns out to be a natural transversal research theme since it is rooted in computer science, mathematics, signal processing and control expertises. Moreover, strong interactions with biologists' research groups have been developed, thank to the location of Digiteo. Objectives of Digiteo, such as dealing with massive distributed data and modelling for inference and prediction, are essential issues in this kind of research. The very goal is finally to integrate a very large amount of knowledge (heterogeneous qualitative and quantitative data, living mostly in huge dimension spaces), on biological systems in a multidisciplinary approach.

These researches can be structured in three axes:

System biology

• Graphical models of interactions (as protein-protein interactions, regulatory and metabolic networks...)
• Dynamical interactions model identification (population evolution processes, cellular processes...)
• Macromolecular structures (RNA and protein structure prediction, comparison, design)

Dedicated sensors and related signal processing

• Medical image processing (3D video reconstruction for computer-aided radiology and surgery, very efficient lossless compression, features extraction for oncology diagnosis)
• Exposure statistical analyses (electromagnetic, chemical, radioprotection)
• Micro and Nano biocompatible technologies (diamond technologies, biodegradable polymer nanostructure)
• Human-machine interfaces (brain computer interface for disabled persons)

Specific knowledge interpretation and extraction methods

• Huge dimension statistical data analyses, with very few replicates and a poor signal to noise ratio (gene discovery, functional genome annotation, biomarker selection, regulatory pathways extraction...)
• Design of heterogeneous database architectures, querying and integrating data, guiding the analysis process, mining dedicated data (signalling pathways extraction)
• Directed information estimators for casual relationship extraction (regulatory pathways extraction)

This constitutes a wide spectrum of research driven by biological, health-related and even environmental purposes, and based on fundamental researches in domains such as knowledge integration, interpretation and extraction, combinatorial and multi-criteria algorithms design, uncertainties modelling and propagation. This leads to developing generic tools that will give access to innovative solutions of the specific problems proposed by the biology community.

The two senior invited chairs who have been funded by Digiteo for the next four years (2008-2011) are Professor Alfred Hero and Professor Peter Clote.

Professor Alfred Hero (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and, by courtesy, Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Department of Statistics - University of Michigan) will work on "Distributed active network sensing and estimation (DANSE)".

Professor Peter Clote (Department of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Department of Biology - Boston College) will work on "RNA structural and systems biology".

Both professors will have certainly a strong impact on the development of the current works in this area.