Short Course Description
Biological and medical research has undergone a revolution following the Human Genome Project: First, a single genome was sequenced, and today tens of thousands of human genomes are sequenced every year. At the same time a huge number of genomes of other species (animals, plants, bacteria, viruses) are sequenced. State-of-the-art experimental technologies are evolving and producing information that enables revealing revolutionary insights that will impact our lives, our health and the world around us. Making use of these technologies and analyzing their experimental results requires advanced computational methods. To a large extent the bottleneck of the analysis has shifted from the production of the data to its analysis.
The course will discuss algorithms for major computational problems in biology and medicine. We will learn precise algorithms for problems that can be solved exactly and efficiently, and approximation algorithms and heuristics for more difficult problems. Biological examples will be presented for each problem. The computational methods combine methodologies from algorithms, complexity, graph theory, probability, statistics, optimization, machine learning and more. Details of the topics to be studied are displayed on the course website.
The course does not require a biological background.
Full Syllabus
