Research Objective:

News:

• November 10, 2009  Congratulations to Dr. Krister Swenson, who successfully defended his dissertation this afternoon, in the presence of jury members Profs. Babak Falsafi (EPFL, jury president), Anastasia Ailamaki (EPFL), Marie-France Sagot (U. Lyon and INRIA), David Sankoff (U. Ottawa), and Bernard Moret. The jury unanimously nominated the work for the annual EPFL Dissertation Award.
• October 2009  Cristina Ghiurcuta has joined our lab, completing our team for this coming academic year. All of us at the lab are involved in the Advanced Algorithms course for this fall, Nishanth and Cristina taking the course, Bernard teaching it, and Vaibhav, Wei, Xiuwei, Yann, and Yu working as TAs for it.
• September 2009  New faces, and missing old friends... Oana Jurj completed her summer in our lab and returned to Timisoara, where she will start her MS program; she leaves behind many friends and will be missed. Krister Swenson left for Canada to start his postdoctoral studies with David Sankoff at the University of Ottawa (and with Anne Bergeron at the University of Montreal). We are all desolate -- Krister made a lot of friends, had assumed quiet leadership in the lab, and had been working with Bernard Moret since 2002 in New Mexico (learning how to rock climb with him). We are also very proud of what Krister has achieved and looking forward to continue working with him. He will return for 10 days in early November for the formal defense of his Ph.D. and suitable festivities!

  Fortunately, in this time of separation, we were delighted to welcome Nishanth Nair to our lab. Nishanth arrived on Sept. 14 and is already a familiar figure in the lab. Cristina Ghiurcuta will arrive at the end of the month and complete our new roster.

• July 2009  We are very happy to report that Cristina Ghiurcuta and Nishanth Nair will join the EPFL PhD program this fall and work in our lab. Cristina is completing her MS at the University of Timisoara in Romania, while Nishanth finished his MS at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and is currently working for Microsoft Research. We are looking forward to welcoming them both in the lab this fall.
• June 1, 2009  Ms. Oana Jurj joins our laboratory for a 3-month research summer; she is finishing her degree at the University of Timisoara in Romania and is interested in machine learning.
• September 2008  New postdoctoral fellow Wei Xu joins our group. Wei earned his BS degree in physics from Nanjing U. in China, then left for Canada where he earned an MS degree, also in physics, from McMaster U.; he recently completed his PhD in discrete mathematics at the U. of Ottawa, under the direction of Prof. David Sankoff. His research interests revolve around models and algorithms for genomic rearrangements.
• June 2008  Jijun Tang, past PhD student of Bernard Moret as well as a lab co-author and collaborator (and recent visitor), was tenured and promoted at the University of South Carolina. Congratulations!
• February 2008  New Ph.D. student Vaibhav Rajan joins our group. Vaibhav earned his BS at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, India, and just completed his MS degree at EPFL. His main research interest is algorithm design.
• December 5, 2007  We are very proud to report that postdoctoral fellow Alexandros Stamatakis received a prestigious Emmy Noether award. This award will support Alexandros and a research group of his own for the next five years at a German university -- an ideal start for an academic career. Our heartfelt congratulations to Alexis!
• October 15, 2007  Congratulations to Thomas Turnherr, who successfully defended his MS thesis, on classification of stem cell populations; Thomas did his work in Singapore in the A Star research laboratories. We wish him well in his future endeavors.
• September 3, 2007  Congratulations to Maryam Zaheri and to Masoud Alipour, who both successfully defended their MS theses. Maryam's thesis was on the use of phylogenetic information in improving the inference of transcriptional regulatory networks, while Masoud's was a study of various methods for speeding up phylogenetic bootstrapping, in particular how to determine when enough resampling has been done. Maryam will start work on her Ph.D. this fall in Nicolas Salamin's group at UNIL.
• August 2007  New Ph.D. student Yu Lin joins our group. Yu earned his BS at the University of Science and Technology China and his MS at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the Institute of Computing Technology. He also spent 9 months as an RA at the City University of Hong Kong. He has worked in bicriteria optimization and computational biology.
• February 2007  New Ph.D. student Yann Christinat, back from a stay at Siemens Princeton lab where he completed his MS thesis, joins our group. His interests are in DNA sequence analysis, in particular sequence-based domain identification. MS student Masoud Alipour will do his MS thesis in our lab and work part-time with Alexis Stamatakis as a programming assistant.
• November 2006  We have moved to our new quarters (INJ 230-1-2 and INJ 211); many thanks to Professor Spaccapietra for his gracious hospitality. We are looking forward to collaborations with his group in the area of database research for bioinformatics.
• July 2006  Postdoctoral fellow Alexandros Stamatakis, the author of RaxML, currently the fastest software for maximum likelihood inference of phylogenies from nucleotide sequences, and new Ph.D. student Xiuwei Zhang, who earned her MS from TsingHua University and is interested in learning and statistical approaches, join our laboratory.
• June 2006  The laboratory opens (in principle) with the arrival from the USA of Professor Moret and Ph.D. student Krister Swenson.

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For a humorous and fast-reading account of OS development, as well as another take on the Microsoft empire and its competition, you should definitely read "In The Beginning There Was The Command Line", by Neal Stephenson (widely available online).

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