Part I: Nest: NEtworked Smartphones for Target Localization
Target localization has many real-world applications such as sniper localization, vehicle localization and tracking, and emergency responses. Modern smartphones are powerful wireless sensing, computation and communication devices. In this talk, I will presents Nest, a novel system using wirelessly connected smartphones to localize remote targets based on sound and sight. The system has four major components: image-based localization, acoustics-based localization, wireless ad-hoc networking, and middle-ware services for time synchronization and secure communication. Single-image, two-image, video, and TDOA-acoustics based methods have been developed and a prototype system has been implemented on Google Nexus One smartphones running Android. Experimental results show that the system can achieve good localization accuracy.
Part II:Model Assessment and Refinement in Protein Structure Prediction
Protein folding is one of biggest unsolved problems in science. In recent years, the gap between the number of known sequences and known structures is rapidly increasing. Computational protein structure prediction provides a cheap, fast, and large scale approach to address the challenge. A significant event in this field is the world-wide biennial CASP (Critical Assessment of techniques for protein Structure Prediction) competition organized by the US Protein Structure Prediction Center, aiming at providing an objective assessment of the state of the art. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of model quality assessment and refinement and present our system Mufold and methods used in the ongoing CASP10 competition.
Biography:
Yi Shang is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Computer Science Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997, M.S. degree from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, in 1991, and B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, in 1988. He has published over 150 refereed papers in the areas of nonlinear optimization, wireless sensor networks, mobile computing, artificial intelligence, and bioinformatics and was issued 6 patents. He has received funding from NSF, NIH, Army, DARPA, Microsoft, and Raytheon. www.cs.missouri.edu/~shangy.