Kernel methods in genomics and computational biology

Support vector machines and kernel methods are increasingly popular in genomics and computational biology, due to their good performance in real-world applications and strong modularity that makes them suitable to a wide range of problems, from the classification of tumors to the automatic annotation of proteins. Their ability to work in high dimension, to process non-vectorial data, and the natural framework they provide to integrate heterogeneous data are particularly relevant to various problems arising in computational biology. In this chapter we survey some of the most prominent applications published so far, highlighting the particular developments in kernel methods triggered by problems in biology, and mention a few promising research directions likely to expand in the future

Chromatic and High-frequency cVEP-based BCI Paradigm

We present results of an approach to a code-modulated visual evoked potential (cVEP) based brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm using four high-frequency flashing stimuli. To generate higher frequency stimulation compared to the state-of-the-art cVEP-based BCIs, we propose to use the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) driven from a small micro-controller board hardware generator designed by our team. The high-frequency and green-blue chromatic flashing stimuli are used in the study in order to minimize a danger of a photosensitive epilepsy (PSE). We compare the the green-blue chromatic cVEP-based BCI accuracies with the conventional white-black flicker based interface.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted for EMBC 2015, IEEE copyrigh

An Algorithm For Building Language Superfamilies Using Swadesh Lists

The main contributions of this thesis are the following: i. Developing an algorithm to generate language families and superfamilies given for each input language a Swadesh list represented using the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) notation. ii. The algorithm is novel in using the Levenshtein distance metric on the IPA representation and in the way it measures overall distance between pairs of Swadesh lists. iii. Building a Swadesh list for the author\u27s native Kinyarwanda language because a Swadesh list could not be found even after an extensive search for it. Adviser: Peter Reves