Applied and Interdisciplinary Informatics Group

Bioinformatics and Systems Biology

Members of the group are involved in a number of projects in the areas of bioinformatics and systems biology. Alex Freitas and Colin Johnson have interests in data mining for bioinformatics research. A number of students (Mudassar Iqbal, Fernando Otero, Carlos Silla, Nick Holden) are working on PhDs in this area, and Phil Cattani is pursuing his PhD in the analysis of medical images.

Another area of interest is simulations and systems biology. Dominique Chu is pursuing projects jointly with the biosciences department at Kent on simulations of bacterial genetics, and also working with PhD student Radu Zabet on cellular computing. Colin Johnson, working with PhD student Emmet McIntyre and Bill Gullick from the department of BioSciences, has interests in simulation for understanding the development of cancer and other medical problems.

Visualization

The group has a strong interest in visualization. Peter Rodgers works on visualization based around graphs, Euler and Venn diagrams both from a theoretical perspective, and using empirical methods to understand how people understand information presented in that form. Leishi Zhang works as a research assistant on a recent EPSRC project in this area. John Bovey has also worked on empirical methods for testing the comprehensibility of visualizations.

Bioinspired Computation

The group has an interest in bioinspired computing, in particular evolutionary methods (genetic algorithms and genetic programming) and swarm methods (particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization). Alex Freitas works on the application of these ideas to data mining problems, and Colin Johnson has particular interests in Genetic Programming and links with programming language theory, on which topic PhD student Lawrence Beadle works. Machine learning is another topic of interest, with PhD students Simon Haggett and Siddartha Ghosh working on problems in this area.

Computational Methods in Natural and Social Sciences

Members of the group have interests in the application of computational methods in other areas. For example, Nick Miles is studying the use of bioinspired algorithms for astrophysics data analysis, whilst Rick Walker is finishing his PhD, supervised by Peter Kenny, in the visualization and steering of simulations of star formation. Ahmed Okasha is studying computational methods in economics for his PhD work.