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.  
Meshari Alazami, a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Associate Professor Xin Gao, successfully defended his thesis proposal on May 22, 2018.  His topic, "Towards Rational Design of Biosynthesis Pathways", was well received by committee members Associate Professor Xin Gao, Distinguished Professor Takashi Gojobori and Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf. 
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.
Abdullah Khamis has had quite an impressive career so far. After graduating with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from KAUST under the supervision of Professor Vladimir Bajic and Associate Professor Xin Gao, he now works as the Director of Data Science in the Center for Strategic Studies (CSS) of the Royal Court of Saudi Arabia.
Congratulates Ramzan, Hiro, and Yu on their work on developing a novel method that combines the strength of probabilistic graphical models, Hilbert space embedding, and deep learning to model binding affinity of transcription factors which was accepted by Bioinformatics. 
​​​​​Five research groups from CBRC participated in this year's National Academic Talent Development Program (NATDP) Symposium on April 20. The Knowledge Mining Lab presented their research on Microbial Knowledge-based Expolaration Systems as well as Novel Computational Methods that Facilitate Development of Cyanofactories for Free Fatty Acid Production.