Mini-course on Clustering and Phylogenetics

Mini-course on Clustering and Phylogenetics

Prof. Martin Milanič, University of Primorska, Slovenia

Mo 25 Nov. 2024, 15.30-17.30 (aula T.05, CV3)
Tue 26 Nov. 2024, 11.30-13.30 (aula B, CV1)
Thu 28 Nov. 2024, 10.30-12.30 (aula T.04, CV3) 

Abstract:

Clustering and phylogenetics, respectively, deal with the following central problems in biology:
1) How to split a set of experimentally obtained data into groups (clusters) so that the data inside the same cluster will be are as similar as possible to each other, while the data in different clusters will be as different as possible? 
2) For a given set of existing animal or plant species, determine how they developed from a common ancestor.
In this series of lectures, we will discuss some of the most important models and algorithms for hierarchical and nonhierarchical clustering, as well as for the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees, including distance-based methods and character-based methods.

Short bio:

Martin Milanič is a professor of Mathematics at the University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia. His research interests are in Discrete Mathematics, with an emphasis on Graph Theory and Hypergraphs, including structural and algorithmic graph theory, graph width parameters, and structure and characterizations of graphs in hereditary classes, applications of hypergraphs to graph theory, and applications of combinatorial optimization and graph theory to computational biology. He received his PhD in Operations Research from Rutgers University. After that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Technology at Bielefeld University, in the junior research group Combinatorial Search Algorithms in Bioinformatics (at AG Genome Informatics), led by Ferdinando Cicalese. 

Martin Milanič is a leading expert on structural and algorithmic graph theory. He has co-authored a book on discrete mathematics with logic, two book chapters, over 90 journal research papers, and over 40 contributions to peer-reviewed computer science conferences. He was a PC co-chair of WG 2024 and GROW 2022, and a program committee member of several algorithmic conferences (including IWOCA 2024, WG 2022, SODA 2022, WG 2021, LAGOS 2021, and MFCS 2019). He gave invited seminar talks at several renowned institutions including Princeton University, ENS de Lyon, Charles University, LIRMM, Université de Montpellier and CNRS, and Institute for Basic Science, Korea. In 2018-2019 he held a 3-month visiting professor position at Osaka Prefecture University in Japan, and in 2014 and 2018 he was a visiting researcher at Université Paris–Dauphine in France.