Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

                   Ryerson Hall -- 1100 E. 58th Street

                 S E M I N A R   A N N O U N C E M E N T


DATE:   Monday, February 22, 1999

TIME:   2:30 p.m.

PLACE:  Ryerson 276

GUEST SPEAKER:  Alberto Maria Segre
                The University of Iowa

TALK TITLE:     A Distributed Hybrid Optimization Technique
                for Protein Structure Precition

ABSTRACT:

The holy grail of computational biology is the determination of a
protein's three dimensional shape -- and, consequently, its biological
function -- from its primary structure, expressed as the sequence of
constituent amino acids.  We are developing a new hybrid optimization
approach to this problem that builds on previous work in distributed
search techniques for mechanized reasoning and combinatorial
optimization, interior-point optimization methods, and protein
energetics.                                                           

This talk will focus on the use of \fInagging\fP, a novel paradigm for
search in a distributed computing environment, in our protein folding
work.  Nagging requires relatively infrequent and brief interprocessor
communication, is naturally \fIfault tolerant\fP (\fIi.e.,\fP
unaffected by the dynamic loss of processing elements) and
exceptionally \fIscalable\fP in practice (\fIi.e.,\fP robust in the
presence of high message latencies, and, therefore, suitable for use
in very large networks).

Joint work with Yinyu Ye (Management Sciences/Applied Math), Kenneth
Murphy (Biochemistry), and William Kearney (College of Medicine NMR
Facility).