The lunch starts at 12:00, and the talk will start around 12:20.

NB: Wednesday BigInsight Lunches are open to staff and students from any of the BigInsight partners, including UiO, but not to others.

Speaker: Geir Kjetil Sandve and Ingrid Hobæk Haff

Location: 8. floor Niels Henrik Abel’s building.

Title: Deciphering immune recognition through machine learning

Abstract:

In addition to saving our life at a daily basis, the immune system is an astonishing construction that presents us with a myriad riddles. The adaptive immune system is particularly mind-boggling, being able to detect invaders that bear no common recognizable features. Immune recognition is encoded in a very short sequence that is very easy to read and very hard to interpret. In the recently awarded convergence environment ImmunoLingo, we aim to decipher the language of immune recognition, which has the potential to revolutionize diagnostics, biological drugs and vaccine development. Specifically, we aim to develop novel machine learning methods to predict which pathogen a given immune cell recognizes, as well as predicting disease states based on sequencing of immune cell receptors in a blood sample. Finally, we hypothesize that the intriguingly low dimensionality of the feature space, in combination with very high dimensionality of the response, represents an exciting problem class that may inspire novel methodology development in statistics.