On November 20, Professor Huang Yu, of Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, gave a lecture to the students of Kuang Yaming Honors School and the Top-Ranking Class, and his title was “Let Math + Programming Replace Your Eyes: Data Mining and Application of Personalized Drug Bioinformatics.”

In this lecture, Professor Huang talked, in a rigorous but witty language, about the relations of bioinformatics, big data application and drug research and development. As a well-known bioinformatics scientist, Huang has made great achievements in the fields of computational genomics, bioinformatics and bioscience. 

Throughout the lecture, students listened carefully, there was good interaction between teachers and students, and there was a strong academic atmosphere.

Professor Huang first introduced his personal experiences and the research areas where he is currently engaged. Then, he took human evolution as the starting point and the evolutionary history of the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens as examples to discuss the biological effects of gene flow and turnover in the evolution, and he further explained the importance of biological information collection and application in modern biological research.

He further explained the importance of biological information collection and application in modern biological research and cited the famous “Monty Hall problem” and its algorithm to reflect the important role of computer data algorithm in information processing.

He then discussed the difficulties and challenges in the development of next-generation biological drugs, especially tumor-targeted therapeutics, in terms of the collection of biological information, biological differences in individual genes, uncertainty in the processing of genetic data samples, and the biological effects of drug sensitivity.

He also introduced the progress in his team’s research on genomic data of cancer patients and the new results of drug development.

He discussed the Accurity software developed by his team for biological sequencing, its advantage over Sclust and its breakthrough in the study of the tumor evolution model from the perspective of parameter analysis and data simulation.

In terms of model building, the professor introduced some of the required knowledge and main stages of modeling from the perspectives of data processing, algorithm application, and programming implementation, and explained that the statistical-based computational model will gradually become mainstream in the Modeller era.

In addition, he introduced the concept of deep learning and machine learning of artificial intelligence to the students and recommended reference textbooks on modeling and intelligent algorithm applications.

Finally, the professor quoted Isaac Newton as saying: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He also wished the students success in all walks of life. The lecture ended with a round of applause.