machine learning

Hayssam Dahrouj

Senior Research Scientist at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology)

Karen Sanchez

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Karen Sanchez is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the IVUL lab at KAUST, specializing in deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare applications. Her research focuses on video understanding, domain adaptation, generative AI, and methods for preserving patient privacy.

Hani A. Al Majed

M.S. Student
Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's student at KAUST under the supervision of Professor Bernard Ghanem, with expertise in machine learning workflow automation, physics-informed neural operators, and AI for Science, particularly in chemistry applications. Passionate about leveraging AI to solve complex scientific problems.

Ahmad Sait

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Ahmad Sait is a Master's student in the Computer Science program at KAUST. Before joining KAUST, Ahmad obtained his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. Ahmad is also a KAUST Academy graduate from the AI track, having been under the supervision of Prof. Naeemullah Khan. The Academy provided him with seven opportunities to assist in teaching students enrolled in subsequent cohorts.

Saleh AlJazzar

Research Fellow at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) .

Muhammad Esmat

Visiting student at, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Ebrahim Al-Safadi

Intern, Information Science Lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST),

Yasser Jaber

Visiting Student Researcher ,Machine Learning Engineer at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology).
Syed Abidullah Fareed

Syed Abidullah Fareed

Visiting Student (former), Information Science Lab

Ahsan Mehmood

Intern (former), Information Science Lab
Visiting student at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Abdulkarem Badiea Alshaibani

Visiting Student at the Information Science Lab at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Mining Genome-Scale Growth Phenotype Data through Constant-Column Biclustering

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B3 L5 R5209

Growth phenotype profiling of genome-wide gene-deletion strains overstresses conditions can offer a clear picture that the essentiality of genes depends on environmental conditions. In this dissertation, we first demonstrate that detecting such "co-fit" gene groups can be cast as a less well-studied problem in biclustering, i.e., constant-column biclustering. Despite significant advances in biclustering techniques, very few were designed for mining in growth phenotype data.

Neural Inductive Matrix Factorization for Predicting Disease-Gene Associations

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B3 R5208

In silico prioritization of undiscovered associations can help find causal genes of newly discovered diseases. Some existing methods are based on known associations and side information of diseases and genes. We exploit the possibility of using a neural network model, Neural Inductive Matrix Completion (NIMC) in disease-gene prediction.

Towards rational design of biosynthesis pathways

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B3 R5209

Recent advances in genome editing and metabolic engineering enabled a precise construction of de novo biosynthesis pathways for high-value natural products. One important design decision to make for the engineering of heterologous biosynthesis systems is concerned with which foreign metabolic genes to introduce into a given host organism.

AI4GH Seminar Series - Towards Rational Design of Biosynthesis Pathways

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B2 R5220

Recent advances in genome editing and metabolic engineering enabled a precise construction of de novo biosynthesis pathways for high-value natural products. One important design decision to make for the engineering of heterologous biosynthesis systems is concerned with which foreign metabolic genes to introduce into a given host organism.

AI4GH Seminar Series - Genome-scale Regression Analysis Reveals a Linear Relationship for Promoters and Enhancers After Combinatorial Drug Treatment

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B2 R5220

Drug combination therapy for the treatment of cancers and other multifactorial diseases has the potential of increasing the therapeutic effect while reducing the likelihood of drug resistance. In order to reduce the time and cost spent on comprehensive screens, methods are needed which can model additive effects of possible drug combinations.

Novel computational methods for promoter identification and analysis

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B2 L5 R5209

In this dissertation, I present the methods I have developed for prediction of promoters for different organisms. Instead of focusing on the classification accuracy of the discrimination between promoter and non-promoter sequences, I predict the exact positions of the TSS inside the genomic sequences, testing every possible location. The developed methods significantly outperform the previous promoter prediction programs by considerably reducing the number of false positive predictions. Specifically, to reduce the false positive rate, the models are adaptively and iteratively trained by changing the distribution of samples in the training set based on the false positive errors made in the previous iteration. The new methods are used to gain insights into the design principles of the core promoters. Using model analysis, I have identified the most important core promoter elements and their effect on the promoter activity. I have developed a novel general approach to detect long range interactions in the input of a deep learning model, which was used to find related positions inside the promoter region. The final model was applied to the genomes of different species without a significant drop in the performance, demonstrating a high generality of the developed method.

Drug Repositioning through the Development of Diverse Computational Methods using Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Graph Mining

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KAUST

In this dissertation, we combined artificial intelligence and machine/deep learning with chemical and biological properties to develop several computational methods to solve biomedical domain problems, specifically drug repositioning, and demonstrated their efficiencies and capabilities. We developed three network-based DTI prediction methods using machine learning, graph embedding, and graph mining. These methods significantly improved prediction performance, and the best-performing method even reduces the error rate by more than 33% across all datasets compared to the best state-of-the-art method. As it is more insightful to predict continuous values that indicate how tightly the drug binds to a specific target, we conducted a comparison study of current regression-based methods that predict drug-target binding affinities (DTBA). Our methods demonstrated their efficiency and capability by achieving high prediction performance and identifying therapeutic targets for several cancer types. We further conducted a lung cancer case study of findings that support the novel predicted targets.

Professors discuss big data and human health in latest Sci-Café

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​Professors Takashi Gojobori, Xin Gao and Robert Hoehndorf spoke about big data and human health at the Sci-Café event held on February 27. Their talk, which was moderated by James Calvin, Vice President for Academic Affairs, aimed to answer the question, "Can Big Data Solve My Health Problems?" This event was open to all members of the KAUST community.

SFB Group graduated its third PhD student - Dr. Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin!

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Congratulates the SFB group on graduating its third Ph.D. student, Dr. Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin.

Siqing Hou defends his Master’s thesis

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Siqing Hou, a Master's student under the supervision of Associate Professor Xin Gao, successfully defended his thesis.

Alumni Feature: Abdullah Khamis

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Abdullah Khamis has had quite an impressive career so far. After graduating with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from KAUST under the supervision of Professor Vladimir Bajic and Associate Professor Xin Gao, he now works as the Director of Data Science in the Center for Strategic Studies (CSS) of the Royal Court of Saudi Arabia.

Meshari Alazami defends his thesis proposal

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Meshari Alazami, a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Associate Professor Xin Gao, successfully defended his thesis proposal on May 22, 2018. His topic, "Towards Rational Design of Biosynthesis Pathways", was well received by committee members Associate Professor Xin Gao, Distinguished Professor Takashi Gojobori and Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf.

Meshari Alazmi defends his Ph.D. thesis

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Meshari Alazmi, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Associate Professor Xin Gao, defended his Ph.D. dissertation on October 24, 2018.

LD Motif Finder locates ancient hidden protein patterns

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A machine learning method has identified highly elusive amino acid sequences involved in cell morphogenesis and adhesion and in diseases like cancer.

Approximating a kernel of truth

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Machine learning tasks using very large data sets can be sped up significantly by estimating the kernel function that best describes the data.

Computers excel in chemistry class

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Machine learning models can rapidly and accurately estimate key chemical parameters related to molecular reactivity.

Talented KAUST Ph.D. student aims to revolutionize healthcare with machine learning

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KAUST Ph.D. student, Yu Li, is a talented young computer scientist with an interest in developing novel computational methods and algorithms to solve and understand the principles behind the “bio-world.”

Xin Gao promoted to rank of professor

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Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) would like to congratulate Xin Gao for being promoted to the rank of Professor, effective January 1, 2021. Prof. Gao joined KAUST in October 2010 and became a CBRC PI in January 2013. He has since then produced tremendous work in the areas of computational biology, bioinformatics, machine learning, and algorithms. Dr. Xin Gao is also the Acting Associate Director of the Computational Bioscience Research Center and the lead of the Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group at KAUST. Prior to joining KAUST, he was a Lane Fellow at Lane Center

Training an AI eye on the Moon

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Machine learning accelerates the search for promising Moon sites for energy and mineral resources.

CBRC congratulates Aryam Alotaibi a SRSI student on winning the top paper Award

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Aryam Alotaibi a SRSI student at CBRC wins the top paper Award titled "Computational method to predict drug-disease associations using machine learning and graph embedding."

AI helps diagnose post-COVID lung problems

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A new AI diagnostic tool developed by KAUST scientists allows doctors to visualize lung damage caused by COVID-19 in more detail.

KAUST alumnus named in Forbes' “30 Under 30 Asia list” – Class of 2022

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KAUST alumnus Yu Li (Ph.D. '20) was recently named amongst the Forbes' "30 Under 30 Asia list" – Class of 2022. Forbes recognized the current assistant professor of computer science and engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) for his work developing algorithms to solve problems in biology and health care.

Zhenzhen Zou

Zhenzhen Zou worked as a ​Researcher at Professor Xin Gao's Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Zhenzhen's research interests included Bioinformatics and Machine learning.

Yu Li

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Research Interests Yu Li is a Ph.D. student at KAUST, majoring in Computer Science. His advisor is Prof. Xin Gao. His research interests are Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Bioinformatics. He got his Master degree in Computer Science at KAUST in December 2016. Before that, he got his Bachelor degree in Biosciences at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Scientific and Professional Membership Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence(AAAI) Member International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Member Education Profile Ph.D student, Computer

Xin Gao

Program Chair, Computer Science
Professor Gao is a world-leading expert in developing novel AI solutions for challenges in biology, biomedicine, and health and wellness, with a focus on AI-based drug development, large language models in biomedicine, biomedical imaging analysis, and omics-based disease detection and diagnostics.

Trisevgeni Rapakoulia

Trisevgeni Rapakoulia obtained her Ph.D. degree (2016-2019) in Computer Science under the supervision of Professor Xin Gao at structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group (SFB) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Trisevgeni's research interests include bioinformatics, System Biology, Prediction of harmful SNPs, Genome-Wide Association Studies and Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning Approaches, Evolutionary Algorithms, Feature Selection Techniques. Research field: study the effects of drugs and drug combinations in the transcriptome level

Vasiliki Kordopati

Vasiliki Kordopati obtained Master degree in Computer Science under the co-supervision of Professor Boon Ooi at Photonics Laboratory and Prof. Xin Gao at Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group (SFB) from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Vasiliki is a co-founder of Oæsis, a King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) startup spinout, where she is responsible for product development. A computer engineer by training, she received a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece. Research Interest Vasiliki's

Somayah Albaradei

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Somayah Albaradei is a Ph.D. student at Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group (SFB) under the supervision of Professor Xin Gao at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). ​Somayah obtained her master's degree in computer science from the University of Manitoba, Canada in 2014. Professional Profile 2014: Lecturer at College of Computing and Information Technology-King Abdulaziz University - Jeddah - Saudi Arabia 2010- 2011: Teacher Assistant at College of Computing and Information Technology-King Abdulaziz University - Jeddah - Saudi Arabia 2009-2010: Collaborator

Siqing Hou

Siqing Hou obtained his Master's degree in Computer Science under the supervision of Professor Xin Gao at Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Master Thesis, 2018: Neural Inductive Matrix Completion for Predicting Disease-Gene Associations Research Interests Siqing Hou was working in the fields of Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Machine Learning. Professional Profile Research Student, University of Birmingham, Jul 2015 - Aug 2018 Software Effort Estimation, Machine Learning Education Profile M.Sc. Computer

Siyuan Chen

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Siyuan Chen is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in Prof. Xin Gao's Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Before joining KAUST, Chen obtained a bachelor's degree from the School of Communication and Information Engineering, UESTC, China. Research Interests Siyuan's research interests lie in bioinformatics, computational biology, machine learning, and big data. He intends to work at the intersection between computer science and biology and develop algorithms so as to solve the key problems in medicine as well as in biology.

Sheng Wang

Sheng Wang worked as a Research Scientist at Prof. Xin Gao's Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Sheng got his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010. He was then a postdoc fellow at Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago during 2010 and 2014. During 2014 and 2017, he was a research professional at the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. Since March 2017, he joined the SFB group as a research scientist. Currently, Sheng is a

Sakhaa Alsaedi

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
​Sakhaa Al-Saedi completed her bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 2016 at Taibah University. She is the founder of the Medvation startup company, inventing educational kits that teach children concepts of robotics and Machine Learning (ML) in fun ways. She worked as a product developer at the Namma Al-Munawara company, Madinah, before starting her master's degree at KAUST in 2017. She is currently working with the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) of Professor Robert Hoehndorf on human genome sequencing to evaluate the impact of Saudi-specific allele frequencies on variant calling

Renmin Han

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Structural and Functional Bioinformatics
Renmin Han is a Research Scientist at the Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group (SFB) of Professor Xin Gao at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). ​Renmin obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Research Interests ​Renmin is interested in the development of computer science. Currently, he is working on imaging processing in electron micrography, especially for the reconstruction of biological ultrastructures. His work is to use computational methods to improve the boundary of

Ramzan Umarov

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Ramzan is a PhD candidate, working on solving biological problems by using applied machine learning with focus on deep learning. He has developed deep learning based methods to solve bioinformatics problems achieving state-of-the-art performance, focusing on various aspects of gene regulation. Umarov obtained his Master degree from Imperial College London, Advanced Computing course. Research Interests The main research interest of Ramzan Umarov is applied machine learning especially Deep Learning. Professional Profile 2011-2012, Programmer, Softberry, Mount Kisko, NY, USA 2013-2014, Programmer

Qiming Fang

Prof. Fang is a visiting professor from Hangzhou Dianzi University, China at Prof. Xin Gao's Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group (SFB) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Prof. Fang's research interests include Bioinformatics and Machine learning.

Peng Yang

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Structural and Functional Bioinformatics
Peng Yang worked as a Postdoctoral research fellow at Prof. Xin Gao's Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group (SFB) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) during 2016-2018. Currently, Peng is a research scientist at Baidu Research. Research Interests ​Machine Learning and Data Mining problem, especially online active learning, multi-task learning, recommender systems, and deep learning. Algorithms for bioinformatics problems, especially in disease gene prediction, drug-target interaction prediction, protein complex, and microbial community pattern detection

Mona Alshahrani

Mona Alshahrani obtained her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf at the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Machine Learning, human bioinformatics, data integration. The combination of neuro-symbolic methods over ontologies and semantic RDF graphs with statistical methods. Their applications in data analysis and features representations in several biomedical applications such as phenotypes prediction, drug repurposing, and others. I'm also interested in network

Masheal Alghamdi

Masheal Alghamdi is a Ph. D. candidate in the Computational Imaging Group (VCCIMAGING) under the supervision of Professor Wolfgang Heidrich at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Education and Early Career Masheal obtained her bachelor degree in Computer Science from King Abdul-Aziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2009. After that she joined KAUST to receive her master degree in Computer Science in 2014. Masheal is a researcher in the National Center for Computation Technology and Applied Math (CTAM) at King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)

Majed Alzahrani

Majed Alzahrani obtained PhD degree in Computer Science from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in 2017. His PhD thesis supervisor was Professor Xin Gao. After graduating, he joined Saudi Aramco as a data scientist in its Drilling Data Science unit. Working in one of the largest companies in the world is a dream come true for many, for Majed Alzahrani, things couldn't be better. Research Interest Majed's research interests were in machine learning, structural bioinformatics, synthetic biology.

Maha Thafar

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Research Interests I am a computer scientist focusing on developing novel computational methods using artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and graph mining techniques to solve biomedical problems. I am developing these methods to be applied to large-scale chemical and biomedical data. Currently, I'm working on compound-protein interactions prediction and binding affinity prediction projects. My objective is to empower women in my country with a flourishing academic background that enables building better careers for themselves. Additionally, to create a research culture

Lizhong Ding

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Structural and Functional Bioinformatics
Lizhong Ding worked as a Postdoctoral research fellow at Prof. Xin Gao's Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group (SFB) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) during 2016-2018. Currently, Lizhong is a research scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence. Research Interests Machine learning theory Impact of approximation on learning algorithms, especially discrepancy bounds between approximate and accurate learning, for kernel learning and deep learning Large scale machine learning Large scale matrix analysis/approximation Scalable model

Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin obtained a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science under the co-supervision of Professor Xiangliang Zhang at Machine Intelligence and kNowledge Engineering (MINE) Laboratory and Professor Xin Gao at Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Currently, Ibrahim is working with IT Strategy and Technology Planning Department at Saudi Aramco. Pursued his Ph.D. degree at MINE Lab from 2012 - 2017. Ibrahim obtained his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. Dissertation Title: Learning via Query

Gian Marco Messa

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Gian Marco is a Ph.D. student at the Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group (SFB) under the supervision of Professor Xin Gao at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Gian Marco, upon finishing high school in Lecce (Italy), applied to the Politecnico of Milan in the year 2009 in Physics engineering. Due to personal issues, he came back to his hometown to complete the Bachelor's Degree at the University of Salento in Biotechnology. For his master's degree, seeking innovation and cutting edge knowledge, he moved to the University of Bologna, which offered an M. Sc

Francesco Napolitano

​Francesco is a Computer Scientist with a background in Mathematical Models and Machine Learning. He focused his M.Sc. (University of Salerno, SA, Italy) and Ph.D. (University of Salerno and the University of California, Irvine, CA, USA) on supervised and unsupervised data analysis, particularly for clustering of complex, high-dimensional data. He developed and applied data analysis techniques to problems from different fields, including fault detection in avionics and computational pharmacology, before focusing on bioinformatics and systems biology. Research Interests Francesco's main

Chisato Fujii

Chisato Fujii obtained her Master's degree in Computer Science under the supervision of Prof. Xin Gao at Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Chisato's research interests included Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Born in Japan, Chisato is a software engineer at a fashion technology startup in Cambridge. She works on the development of 3-dimensional garment rendering on a customizable body shape unique to the shopper's size. How would you describe your work/activities at KAUST? ''I studied a

Cheng Wang

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Cheng Wang received his PhD in the Computer Science Program under the supervision of Professor Helmut Pottmann at the Visual Computing Center (VCC). He is now an Assistant Professor at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom Education and Early Career Cheng received his Bachelor's Degree in Automation from Tsinghua University, China in 2016. He joined KAUST to continue his studies and received his Master's Degree in Computer Science in 2018. Research Interest Cheng is mainly interested in Computer Graphics, Geometric Computing, and Machine Learning. Education Profile M.S., Computer

Abdullah Khamis

Abdullah Khamis graduated with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from KAUST under the supervision of Professor Vladimir Bajic and Associate Professor Xin Gao. He now works as the Director of Data Science in the Center for Strategic Studies (CSS) of the Royal Court of Saudi Arabia. He leads the Data Science team in developing several machine learning based predictive models such as sentiment analysis and prediction. Research Interest Abdullah's research interests were in bioinformatics and machine learning.