Mona Alshahrani, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her thesis proposal on October 10, 2018.

Representatives from the KAUST Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), King Saud University (KSU), Taibah University, National Guard Health Affairs (NGHA) and the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Health (MOH) met on October 1 to iron out details of a national initiative to fight infectious diseases.

The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) is one of the most important conferences in the field of bioinformatics and computational biology.  Held in a different European city annually, this year's conference will take place in the historic city of Athens, Greece on September 8-12, 2018.  

Maxat Kulmanov, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended his thesis proposal on July 31, 2018.

​​Three members of the Bio-Ontology Research Group will be presenting their work at the International Society for Computational Biology conference in Chicago, U.S.A.

The recent KAUST Research Conference: Computational and Statistical Interface to Big Data brought together leading computer science researchers and statistical experts to discuss the current state and future of data science. Held on campus from March 19 to 21, the conference covered such data science topics as succinct data representation and storage; big data visualization; parallel and distributed algorithms for inference and optimization; and analysis of large graphs and networks.

Sarah Alghamdi successfully defended her master's thesis on April 10, 2018. Her project, entitled "Ontology Design Patterns for Combining Pathology and Anatomy: Application to Study Ageing and Longevity in Inbred Mouse Strains", was well-received by a panel of professors that included Professor Vladimir Bajic, Associate Professor Xin Gao and Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf.

​CBRC was awarded three Center Partnership Funds by the KAUST Office of Sponsored Research on April 1, 2018.​

​Two students from the Bio-Ontology Research Group presented their research at KAUST Research Conference on Big Data Analyses in Evolutionary Biology.

​The student will work on combining methods from Symbolic Artificial Intelligence (formal logics, rule-based systems) with machine learning and statistical approaches to data mining, and apply these methods to biomedical datasets. Major application areas include understanding molecular mechanisms underlying traits, phenotypes, and disease, and identifying ways to perturb biological systems through bioactive compounds (drugs).​

​The postdoctoral researcher will work on the development and application of Artificial Intelligence methods in bioinformatics and computational biology, with a particular focus on combining symbolic AI approaches (e.g., ontologies, knowledge graphs, rule-based systems) with machine learning methods.​​​

Professor Robert Hoehndorf was a guest speaker at the Science to Watch screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He gave a presentation about artificial intelligence and its implications in the movie.

​Ph.D. student Maxat Kulmanov's paper, "DeepGO: predicting protein functions from sequence and interactions using a deep ontology-aware classifier" was recently published in Bioinformatics.