This talk will discuss some advanced bioinformatics methods and software that can be used to greatly facility the analysis and understanding of high-throughput data. Issues will include drawbacks of commonly used approaches for pathway analysis, a method comparison and benchmarking results, and other issues related to data analysis. The seminar will include live demonstrations on several data sets including the following aspects: i) the identification of significantly affected biological processes and pathways in a given phenotype, ii) identifying putative mechanisms, iii) inferring miRNA activity from mRNA data, iv) identification of biomarkers for a given cancer subtype, v) combining the results of several experiments in a meta-analysis and vi) understanding the differences between respondents and nonrespondents in Folfox/Folfiri treatments for colorectal cancer.

Sorin Draghici is a Program Director in the IIS Division of the National Science Foundation,  Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and the head of the Intelligent Systems and Bioinformatics Laboratory at Wayne State University. Dr. Draghici is a Fellow of IEEE, and an editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Discoveries Journals, Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalized Medicine and others. His publications include two books (Data Analysis Tools for DNA Microarrays and Statistics and Data Analysis for Microarrays using R), 8 book chapters, and over 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications which gathered over 17,000 citations to date. He is also the founder of Advaita Bioinformatics (www.advaitabio.com), a SaaS company providing a cloud-based bioinformatics analysis platform for the analysis and integration of multiple types of omics data.