Topics

<> machine learning (48)

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).

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).

AI4GH Seminar Series - Machine Learning with Biological Knowledge Graphs

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B2 R5220

Abstract Biological data and knowledge bases increasingly rely on Semantic Web technologies and the use of knowledge graphs for data integration, retrieval, and federated queries. In the past years, feature learning methods that are applicable to graph-structured data are becoming available, but have not yet widely been applied and evaluated on structured biological knowledge. We develop novel methods for feature learning on biological knowledge graphs and apply them to the prediction of edges in the knowledge graph representing problems of finding candidate genes of diseases, or drugs

Bio2Vec Kickoff Meeting

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Paris France

​​Research Scientist Senay Kafkas will be attending the Bio2Vec kickoff meeting in Paris, France.

AI4GH Seminar Series - Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B2 R5220

Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge.

AI4GH Seminar Series - Vector Representation of Biological Entities Based on Ontologies and Their Annotations

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B2 R5220

Biological knowledge is widely represented in the form of ontology-based annotations: ontologies describe the phenomena assumed to exist within a domain, and the annotations associate a biological entity with a set of phenomena within the domain.

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.

Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B3 R5209

Abstract Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge. Accurate identification of driver genes and driver mutations is critical for advancing cancer research and personalizing treatment based on accurate stratification of patients. Due to inter-tumor genetic heterogeneity, many driver mutations within a gene occur at low frequencies, which make it challenging to distinguish them from other non-driver mutations. Motivated by these challenges, we

VSIM: Visualization and Simulation of Genomes for Premarital Testing

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B3 L5 R5209

Abstract Interpretation and simulation of the large-scale genomics data are very challenging, and currently, many web tools have been developed to analyze genomic variation which supports automated visualization of a variety of high throughput genomics data. We have developed VSIM an automated and easy to use web application for interpretation and visualization of a variety of genomics data, it identifies the candidate disease variants by referencing to four databases Clinvar, GWAS, DIDA, and PharmGKB, and predicted the pathogenic variants. Moreover, it investigates the attitude towards

AI4GH Seminar Series - VSIM: Visualization and Simulation of Genomes for Premarital Testing

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B2 R5220

Interpretation and simulation of the large-scale genomics data are very challenging, and currently, many web tools have been developed to analyze genomic variation which supports automated visualization of a variety of high throughput genomics data.

Semantic Prioritization of Novel Causative Genomic Variants in Mendelian and Oligogenic Diseases

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B9 R4223

Abstract Recent advances in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies have facilitated the generation of massive amounts of genomic data which in turn is bringing the promise that personalized medicine will soon become widely available. As a result, there is an increasing pressure to develop computational tools to analyze and interpret genomic data. In this dissertation, we present a systematic approach for interrogating patients' genomes to identify candidate causal genomic variants of Mendelian and oligogenic diseases. To achieve that, we leverage the use of biomedical data available

WOMoCoE 2019 | Keynote Presentation-Evaluating ontology modules from the perspective of machine learning @JOWO 2019

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Graz Austria

KAUST Assistant professor Robert Hoehndorf will be giving a keynote presentation at the 4th International Workshop on Ontology Modularity, and Evolution @ JOWO 2019, Graz, Austria.

CBRC Dual Seminar - Analysis of COVID-19 Severity - DeepSVP computational method

Sakhaa Al-Saedi, PhD Student; Azza Althagafi, PhD Student

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KAUST

Sakhaa Al-Saedi: We conduct a systematic genetic analysis of risk variants related to increasing the severity of COVID-19. It leads to a better understanding of its genetic basis and identifies the host genes to be targeted to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and reduce its death toll. Azza Althagafi: We developed DeepSVP, a computational method to prioritize structural variants involved in genetic diseases by combining genomic and gene functions information. DeepSVP significantly improves the success rate of finding causative variants in several benchmarks and can identify novel pathogenic structural variants in consanguineous families.

Characterization of Natural Bacterial Pathogens with Genomic and Predictive Modelling

Dr. Danesh Moradigaravand, Infectious Disease Epidemiology lab, BESE, KAUST

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B3 L5 R5209

In this talk, I will first present how the application of phylogenetic and phylodynamic methods to whole genome sequencing data of multidrug resistant bacterial pathogens provided an in-depth understanding of the epidemiology and evolution of these strains on epidemiological time scales. I will then discuss the characterization of the genomic repertoire of bacterial traits using a combination of machine learning, whole genome sequencing and large-scale phenotypic assays. I will then present the leverage of predictive modelling to predict bacterial features, e.g. antimicrobial resistance, growth, and horizontal gene transfer, from genomic biomarkers. I will finally discuss how large-scale phenotypic assays enabled us to identity genes underlying morphogenesis and biofilm formation.

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

1 min read ·
​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.

Maxat Kulmanov defends his thesis proposal

1 min read ·
Maxat Kulmanov, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended his thesis proposal on July 31, 2018.

Mona Alshahrani defends her thesis proposal

1 min read ·
Mona Alshahrani, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her thesis proposal on October 10, 2018.

Sara Althubaiti defends her Master's thesis

1 min read ·
Sara Althubaiti, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 5, 2018.

Database to support infectious disease research

1 min read ·
Linking disease pathogens to clinical signs and symptoms through a database could support research into the molecular mechanisms of infectious diseases.

MS Thesis Defense: Rare variant collapsing analysis on UK Biobank by Yang Liu

1 min read ·
Yang Liu, M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology research group under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf successfully defended her thesis "Rare variant collapsing analysis on UK Biobank".

MS Thesis Defense: Description Logic EL++Embeddings with Intersectional Closure by Xi Peng

1 min read ·
Xi Peng MS Student under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf successfully defended his thesis "Description Logic EL++Embeddings with Intersectional Closure"

BORG team win at the KAUST-NVIDIA GPU Hackathon 2022

1 min read ·
Congratulations to Senay Kafkas, Maxat Kulmanov and Fernando Zhapa Camacho of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) on winning at the KAUST-NVIDIA GPU Hackathon 2022. The 8th edition of the Hackathon on Accelerating Scientific Applications using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) was held at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), twelve teams of students and researchers enjoyed the opportunity to accelerate their codes in GPU’s under the guidance of expert mentors of NVIDIA, Codee, KAUST Supercomputing Lab (KSL) and KAUST core labs.

Yang Liu

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Yang Liu is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the KAUST Bio-Ontology research group under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST. Research Interests Yang's interests include bioinformatics, machine learning and human genomics. She is interested in building models for human disease diagnosis and prognosis, especially for cancer, and applying statistical methods to analyze human omics data. Education Profile B.Sc, Bioengineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, 2016-2020. M.Sc, Bioengineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi

Xi Peng

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Xi Peng likes pop music and doing sports. He graduated from SUSTech in 2021 and planning to continue his academic career at KAUST under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. "He says KAUST has the best environment to do research. Life in KAUST is also comfortable. I believe I can achieve a lot in KAUST". Research Interest applications of machine learning and logic integration in biology Education Profile B.Sc, Computer Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China, 2017-2021 M.Sc, Computer Science, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal

Tilman Hinnerichs

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Tilman Hinnerichs was a visiting student at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Research Interests Tilman's research interests included ​Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, Ontologies, Reasoning, Logic, Particle Methods. He was particularly interested in the application of machine-learning algorithms to problems of the bioscience field. Education Profile ​Since 2016: Diploma Student, Computer Science, TU Dresden​. 2015-2016: Student, Human Medicine, Charité Berlin.

Shahad Qathan

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Shahad Qathan is an MS candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Research Interests Artificial Intelligence, more specifically Machine Learning and its applications in healthcare and Bioinformatics Education Profile B.Sc, Computer Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2020

Sara Althubaiti

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Sara Althubaiti is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Prior to this, Sara received her master's degree in computer science with a focus on bioinformatics from KAUST in December 2018. Research Interests Sara's research interests include bioinformatics, text mining, ontologies, and cancer. Her research focuses on applying machine learning methods in cancer biology and development specifically in the field of finding driver genes and mutations in

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

Rahaf Shiqdar

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Rahaf Shiqdar was a visiting student from ​Umm Al-Qura University ​at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Rahaf's research interests included ​Bioinformatics, Machine and Deep learning.

Olga Mashkova

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
PhD student in Computer Science. Research interests: machine learning, bioinformatics, mathematics, knowledge representation and reasoning, deep learning, algorithms.

Nurislam Tursynbek

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Nurislam Tursynbek was a visiting student at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Nurislam's research interests included machine learning and computational biology.

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

Maxat Kulmanov

Research Scientist, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Maxat Kulmanov is a Research Scientist in the Bio-Ontology Research Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Maxat's research interests include bioinformatics, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, neural networks, semantic web, and algorithms. He is interested in knowledge discovery and data integration using artificial intelligence and semantic web technologies in biology and biomedicine. Professional Profile 2020-Present: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Computational Bioscience Research Center, King Abdullah University of

Joydeep Medhi

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Joydeep Medhi was a visiting student from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). During his three months internship at BORG he worked on "Machine Learning", Classification of causative disease variant(s) with mutations using Machine Learning Techniques. Successfully implemented and explored different Deep Neural Network architectures utilizing large genome sequencing data, interaction networks and ontologies and performed statistical tests for feature selection

Jay Morgan

Visiting Student, Computer Science
Jay Morgan was a visiting student at (BORG) Bio-Ontology Research Group of Professor Robert Hoehndorf at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. ​Research Interests Jay's research is focused on the verification of machine learning (ML) models, in particular, deep learning. Reasoning as to the decision process of ML is becoming increasingly important especially those that are included in safety-critical systems. Therefore, verifying the properties of the model against requirements as well as interrogating the model itself could provide a great benefit.​​ His

Imane Boudellioua

Imane Boudellioua 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). Imene has a Master's degree in Computer Science from KAUST. During Master's her thesis supervisor was Professor Basem Shihada. Thesis title: " A Vehicular Guidance Wireless Sensor Actuator Network." Research Interests Imane Boudellioua's research interests include the application of machine learning and data mining algorithms for functional annotation of various biological

Azza Althagafi

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Azza Althagafi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Professional Profile ​2016 to present Graduate Student, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. 2015 - 2016: Teaching Assistant, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia. 2014 – 2015: Volunteer Teaching Assistant, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. 2013 – 2016: Assistant Trainer, Mawhiba, The King Abdulaziz and His Companions' Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Scientific and

Ashraf M. Kibriya

Research Interests ​My research interests include the application of Big Data and Machine Learning techniques to real-world problems in various domains, including biology and biomedicine. In particular, I'm interested in Deep Learning, Text Mining, Network Analysis and Graph Mining. Professional Profile ​2018-Present: Postdoctoral Fellow, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia 2011-2018: Doctoral Fellow, KU Leuven, Belgium 2010-2011: Pre-doctoral fellow, KU Leuven, Belgium 2007-2009: Database developer / Datamining specialist, Datamine Ltd., New Zealand 2002-2005: Research Programmer, Machine Learning

Abeer Almutari

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Abeer Almutari obtained her Master's degree in Computer Science under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf at Bio-Ontology Research Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Abeer's research interests included bioinformatics, machine learning and building new automated models using artificial intelligence. Education ​B.Sc. Electrical & Computer Engineering, King Abdul-Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2016

Abdullah Muhammad Kamal

Visiting Student, Computer Science
Abdullah Muhammad-Kamal is a visiting student from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom at (BORG) Bio-Ontology Research Group of Professor Robert Hoehndorf at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Currently on his placement year, interning with the Bio-Ontology Research Group at KAUST, he will be graduating with his Bachelor's degree in Computer and Management Sciences in the summer of 2021. Research Interests ​Abdullah's research interests include Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, and Data Science.
<> artificial intelligence (37)

Yasmeen Alsaedy

M.S. Student, Computer Science
She is an AI researcher specializing in generative AI and deep learning. With a strong academic foundation and hands-on experience in machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence, she is passionate about advancing AI applications in real-world scenarios. She has contributed to cutting-edge projects, published research, and collaborated on innovative solutions that bridge the gap between AI theory and practice. Her expertise includes designing and implementing advanced data models, AI-driven visual/text computing, and deep learning architectures.

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

Ahmed Youssef Ragab Radwan

Visiting Student (former), Information Science Lab
Visiting student at the Information Science Lab, in the Electrical Engineering Department, CEMSE, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

AI4GH Seminar Series | Predicting Protein Function and Phenotype Associations

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B2 R5220

The amount of available protein sequences is rapidly increasing, mainly as a consequence of the development and application of high ​throughput sequencing technologies in the life sciences.

Causality-based new drug development: Some successful cases and a new challenge

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B2 L5 R5209

Abstract The success rate of new drug development is extremely low. It is even lower when the new drug has a novel mechanism of action. From my experience, I propose that the success rate can be dramatically increased by predicting the effects of a drug in humans based on the causality-confirmed data. It is dangerous to develop new drugs based on the data in which causality is not confirmed. In biology, there are three different types of relationships in which the causality is confirmed, i.e. the relationships between parent and child, between gene and phenotype and between intervention and

VSIM: Visualization and Simulation of Genomes for Premarital Testing

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B3 L5 R5209

Abstract Interpretation and simulation of the large-scale genomics data are very challenging, and currently, many web tools have been developed to analyze genomic variation which supports automated visualization of a variety of high throughput genomics data. We have developed VSIM an automated and easy to use web application for interpretation and visualization of a variety of genomics data, it identifies the candidate disease variants by referencing to four databases Clinvar, GWAS, DIDA, and PharmGKB, and predicted the pathogenic variants. Moreover, it investigates the attitude towards

AI4GH Seminar Series - VSIM: Visualization and Simulation of Genomes for Premarital Testing

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B2 R5220

Interpretation and simulation of the large-scale genomics data are very challenging, and currently, many web tools have been developed to analyze genomic variation which supports automated visualization of a variety of high throughput genomics data.

KAUST Research Conference Digital Health 2020

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B19 L2 H1

Computational Bioscience Research Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology is pleased to announce the KAUST Research Conference on Digital Health 2020.

Artificial Intelligence methods for precision health: Applications to rare disease and cancer research

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B9 L2 H2

Abstract The life sciences have invested significant resources in the development and application of semantic technologies to make research data accessible and interlinked, and to enable the integration and analysis of data. Utilizing the semantics associated with research data in data analysis approaches is often challenging. Now, novel methods are becoming available that combine symbolic methods and statistical methods in Artificial Intelligence. In my talk, I will show how to incorporate biological background knowledge in machine learning models for the identification of gene-disease

CBRC Dual Seminar - Analysis of COVID-19 Severity - DeepSVP computational method

Sakhaa Al-Saedi, PhD Student; Azza Althagafi, PhD Student

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KAUST

Sakhaa Al-Saedi: We conduct a systematic genetic analysis of risk variants related to increasing the severity of COVID-19. It leads to a better understanding of its genetic basis and identifies the host genes to be targeted to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and reduce its death toll. Azza Althagafi: We developed DeepSVP, a computational method to prioritize structural variants involved in genetic diseases by combining genomic and gene functions information. DeepSVP significantly improves the success rate of finding causative variants in several benchmarks and can identify novel pathogenic structural variants in consanguineous families.

Professor Robert Hoehndorf's PhenomeNET method wins at Ontology matching workshop

1 min read ·
Professor Robert Hoehndorf and Postdoctoral Fellow Miguel Angel Rodriguez Garcia are the winners of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative Challenge sponsored by Pistoia Alliance.

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

1 min read ·
​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.

The awesome scope of big data

1 min read ·
Sifting through huge amounts of data may bring a better understanding of whale shark social structures, protein targets for drug therapies and disease-causing genes.

Sarah Alghamdi defends her master's thesis

1 min read ·
Sarah Alghamdi successfully defended her master's thesis on April 10, 2018. Her project, entitled "Ontology Design Patterns for Combining Pathology and Anatomy: Application to Study Ageing and Longevity in Inbred Mouse Strains", was well-received by a panel of professors that included Professor Vladimir Bajic, Associate Professor Xin Gao and Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf.

Maxat Kulmanov defends his thesis proposal

1 min read ·
Maxat Kulmanov, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended his thesis proposal on July 31, 2018.

Azza Althagafi defends her Master's thesis

1 min read ·
Azza Althagafi, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 1, 2018.

KAUST Research Conference: AI in Medicine

1 min read ·

Database to support infectious disease research

1 min read ·
Linking disease pathogens to clinical signs and symptoms through a database could support research into the molecular mechanisms of infectious diseases.

Symbol of change for AI development

1 min read ·
Bridging the knowledge gap in artificial intelligence requires an embedding function that helps step between different types of "thinking."

Robert Hoehndorf promoted to associate professor at KAUST

1 min read ·
KAUST faculty member Robert Hoehndorf was recently promoted from the rank of assistant professor to associate professor. Hoehndorf’s promotion caps a year-long process where the German researcher’s scientific and scholarly output was measured and evaluated by internal and external reviews.

Former KAUST VSRP student wins Best Talk Award at ISMB 2020

1 min read ·
Runar Reve, a former KAUST Visiting Student Research Program (VSRP) student, recently received the International Society for Computational Biology’s (ISCB) Bio-Ontologies COSI – Best Talk Award at the 28th Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2020.

BORG team win at the KAUST-NVIDIA GPU Hackathon 2022

1 min read ·
Congratulations to Senay Kafkas, Maxat Kulmanov and Fernando Zhapa Camacho of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) on winning at the KAUST-NVIDIA GPU Hackathon 2022. The 8th edition of the Hackathon on Accelerating Scientific Applications using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) was held at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), twelve teams of students and researchers enjoyed the opportunity to accelerate their codes in GPU’s under the guidance of expert mentors of NVIDIA, Codee, KAUST Supercomputing Lab (KSL) and KAUST core labs.

MS Thesis Defense | Learning 3D structures for protein function prediction

1 min read ·
Student Nurul Muttakin from the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Robert Hoehndorf successfully defends his Masters thesis. He presented his research on the topic " Learning 3D structures for protein function prediction".

PhD Dissertation Defense | Ontology design patterns and methods for integrating phenotype ontologies

1 min read ·
CBRC PhD student Sarah Alghamdi successfully defended her dissertation last week. She has been an essential member of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) since 2015.Her research interests include the applications of artificial intelligence and statistical methods to genomics and healthcare.

PhD Dissertation Defense | Prioritizing Causative Genomic Variants by Integrating Molecular and Functional Annotations from Multiple Biomedical Ontologies

1 min read ·
CBRC PhD Student Azza Althagafi successfully defends her dissertation under the supervision of Associate Professor Robert Hoehndorf. She has been a member of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) since 2016. Her research interest lies in the crossroads of computer science and biology, leveraging AI techniques to explore the human genome's intricacies and its link to various diseases.

A new approach to rare disease diagnosis

1 min read ·
An innovative AI-based tool leverages varied symptom descriptions, along with evidence from the scientific literature and genomic datasets, to pinpoint disease-associated gene variants.

AI tool predicts function of unknown proteins

1 min read ·
Powered by logic and large language models, DeepGO-SE predicts the biological role of proteins and could be used to aid drug discovery.

Shahad Qathan

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Shahad Qathan is an MS candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Research Interests Artificial Intelligence, more specifically Machine Learning and its applications in healthcare and Bioinformatics Education Profile B.Sc, Computer Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2020

Sarah Alghamdi

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Sarah Alghamdi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Research Interests Sarah's research interests include applications of artificial intelligence and using statistical methods to genomics and healthcare. Professional Profile Program Committee for the International Conference of Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2022) Program Committee for the International Society of Molecular Biology (ISMB 2022) - Bio-Ontology track 2018-2021: Teaching Assistant positions: CS

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

Runar Reve

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
​Runar Reve is from Klepp, Rogaland, in Norway. He is currently in his industry year as a visiting student for his bachelor's degree in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Aberystwyth University in Wales and will obtain his degree by the summer of 2021. He is currently working with Professor Robert Hoehndorf Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) on genome-wide association study (GWAS) to find variants, or sets of variants, in genomes that can result in genetic disease.​ Research Interests Genome-Wide Association Studies​. Education ​Undergrad in Artificial Intelligence (with integrated year

Robert Hoehndorf

Associate Professor, Computer Science
Robert Hoehndorf is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at KAUST. His research focuses on bioinformatics, knowledge representation and reasoning, Semantic Web technologies, and neuro-symbolic methods.

Maxat Kulmanov

Research Scientist, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Maxat Kulmanov is a Research Scientist in the Bio-Ontology Research Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Maxat's research interests include bioinformatics, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, neural networks, semantic web, and algorithms. He is interested in knowledge discovery and data integration using artificial intelligence and semantic web technologies in biology and biomedicine. Professional Profile 2020-Present: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Computational Bioscience Research Center, King Abdullah University of

MD Nurul Muttakin

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Nurul Muttakin, is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST Nurul completed his B.Sc. in CSE from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh. Research Interest Nurul is Interested in the application of Artificial Intelligence in Bioinformatics tasks like protein function prediction as well as understanding the theory behind it. Education Profile B.Sc. in CSE, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh

Kexin Niu

Ph.D. Student, Bioengineering
Kexin Niu, is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST Kexin obtained her bachelor's degree in Bioinformatics from Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. "What I like best about KAUST is the communication of diverse cultures and diverse disciplines, which enables me to have more possibilities." Research Interest Kexin’ s Research interests include but are not limited to bioinformatics and application of machine learning method in biomedical data. Education Profile 2016 -

Azza Althagafi

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Azza Althagafi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Professional Profile ​2016 to present Graduate Student, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. 2015 - 2016: Teaching Assistant, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia. 2014 – 2015: Volunteer Teaching Assistant, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. 2013 – 2016: Assistant Trainer, Mawhiba, The King Abdulaziz and His Companions' Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Scientific and
<> bioinformatics (37)

AI4GH Seminar Series - Machine Learning with Biological Knowledge Graphs

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B2 R5220

Abstract Biological data and knowledge bases increasingly rely on Semantic Web technologies and the use of knowledge graphs for data integration, retrieval, and federated queries. In the past years, feature learning methods that are applicable to graph-structured data are becoming available, but have not yet widely been applied and evaluated on structured biological knowledge. We develop novel methods for feature learning on biological knowledge graphs and apply them to the prediction of edges in the knowledge graph representing problems of finding candidate genes of diseases, or drugs

AI4GH Seminar Series| Artificial Intelligence for Genomics and Health: Introduction and Overview

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B2 R5220

Abstract Genomics and health are prime areas for the development and application of novel intelligent algorithms due to a large amount of available research data, the high complexity of the problem, and the significant social and economic benefits of improving health outcomes in humans. In the past, genomics and health have been one of the key drivers in the development of Artificial Intelligence methods, including machine learning, expert systems, or graph-based algorithms. I will introduce the new seminar series on Artificial Intelligence for Genomics and Health (AI4GH), and then discuss our

AI4GH Seminar Series - Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B2 R5220

Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge.

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.

Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B3 R5209

Abstract Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge. Accurate identification of driver genes and driver mutations is critical for advancing cancer research and personalizing treatment based on accurate stratification of patients. Due to inter-tumor genetic heterogeneity, many driver mutations within a gene occur at low frequencies, which make it challenging to distinguish them from other non-driver mutations. Motivated by these challenges, we

VSIM: Visualization and Simulation of Genomes for Premarital Testing

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B3 L5 R5209

Abstract Interpretation and simulation of the large-scale genomics data are very challenging, and currently, many web tools have been developed to analyze genomic variation which supports automated visualization of a variety of high throughput genomics data. We have developed VSIM an automated and easy to use web application for interpretation and visualization of a variety of genomics data, it identifies the candidate disease variants by referencing to four databases Clinvar, GWAS, DIDA, and PharmGKB, and predicted the pathogenic variants. Moreover, it investigates the attitude towards

AI4GH Seminar Series - VSIM: Visualization and Simulation of Genomes for Premarital Testing

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B2 R5220

Interpretation and simulation of the large-scale genomics data are very challenging, and currently, many web tools have been developed to analyze genomic variation which supports automated visualization of a variety of high throughput genomics data.

Knowledge-based methods in life sciences

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B9 L2 H2 R2325

In my research I aim to understand how formalized knowledge bases can be used to systematically structure and integrate biological knowledge, and how to utilize these formalized knowledge bases as background knowledge to improve scientific discovery in biology and biomedicine. To achieve these aims, I develop methods for representing, integrating, and analyzing data and knowledge with the specific aim to make the combination of data and formalized knowledge accessible to data analytics and machine learning in bioinformatics. Biomedicine, and life sciences in general, are an ideal domain for knowledge-driven data analysis methods due to the large number of formal knowledge bases that have been developed to capture the broad, diverse, and heterogeneous data and knowledge.

Capturing Actionable Dynamics with Structured Latent Ordinary Differential Equations

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B3 L5 R5220

We propose a structured latent ODE model that explicitly captures system input variations within its latent representation. Building on a static latent variable specification, our model learns (independent) stochastic factors of variation for each input to the system, thus separating the effects of the system inputs in the latent space. This approach provides actionable modeling through the controlled generation of time-series data for novel input combinations (or perturbations). Additionally, we propose a flexible approach for quantifying uncertainties, leveraging a quantile regression formulation.

Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

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KAUST Hotel

Bioinformatics experts, Don’t miss the opportunity to collaborate with researchers and field professionals in the BioHackathonMENA2023 event. BioHackathon events involve a large number of people that meet on-site to discuss ideas and implement projects in a collaborative manner during intensive coding sessions.

Professor Robert Hoehndorf's PhenomeNET method wins at Ontology matching workshop

1 min read ·
Professor Robert Hoehndorf and Postdoctoral Fellow Miguel Angel Rodriguez Garcia are the winners of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative Challenge sponsored by Pistoia Alliance.

Sarah Alghamdi defends her master's thesis

1 min read ·
Sarah Alghamdi successfully defended her master's thesis on April 10, 2018. Her project, entitled "Ontology Design Patterns for Combining Pathology and Anatomy: Application to Study Ageing and Longevity in Inbred Mouse Strains", was well-received by a panel of professors that included Professor Vladimir Bajic, Associate Professor Xin Gao and Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf.

Maxat Kulmanov defends his thesis proposal

1 min read ·
Maxat Kulmanov, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended his thesis proposal on July 31, 2018.

Azza Althagafi defends her Master's thesis

1 min read ·
Azza Althagafi, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 1, 2018.

Sara Althubaiti defends her Master's thesis

1 min read ·
Sara Althubaiti, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 5, 2018.

Robert Hoehndorf promoted to associate professor at KAUST

1 min read ·
KAUST faculty member Robert Hoehndorf was recently promoted from the rank of assistant professor to associate professor. Hoehndorf’s promotion caps a year-long process where the German researcher’s scientific and scholarly output was measured and evaluated by internal and external reviews.

MS Thesis Defense: Rare variant collapsing analysis on UK Biobank by Yang Liu

1 min read ·
Yang Liu, M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology research group under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf successfully defended her thesis "Rare variant collapsing analysis on UK Biobank".

MS Thesis Defense | Learning 3D structures for protein function prediction

1 min read ·
Student Nurul Muttakin from the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Robert Hoehndorf successfully defends his Masters thesis. He presented his research on the topic " Learning 3D structures for protein function prediction".

A new approach to rare disease diagnosis

1 min read ·
An innovative AI-based tool leverages varied symptom descriptions, along with evidence from the scientific literature and genomic datasets, to pinpoint disease-associated gene variants.

AI tool predicts function of unknown proteins

1 min read ·
Powered by logic and large language models, DeepGO-SE predicts the biological role of proteins and could be used to aid drug discovery.

Yang Liu

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Yang Liu is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the KAUST Bio-Ontology research group under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST. Research Interests Yang's interests include bioinformatics, machine learning and human genomics. She is interested in building models for human disease diagnosis and prognosis, especially for cancer, and applying statistical methods to analyze human omics data. Education Profile B.Sc, Bioengineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, 2016-2020. M.Sc, Bioengineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi

Tilman Hinnerichs

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Tilman Hinnerichs was a visiting student at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Research Interests Tilman's research interests included ​Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, Ontologies, Reasoning, Logic, Particle Methods. He was particularly interested in the application of machine-learning algorithms to problems of the bioscience field. Education Profile ​Since 2016: Diploma Student, Computer Science, TU Dresden​. 2015-2016: Student, Human Medicine, Charité Berlin.

Shahad Qathan

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Shahad Qathan is an MS candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Research Interests Artificial Intelligence, more specifically Machine Learning and its applications in healthcare and Bioinformatics Education Profile B.Sc, Computer Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2020

Senay Kafkas

Research Scientist, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Research Interests Senay's research interests include biomedical text/data mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data analysis. Scientific and Professional Membership ​International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) (2010-present). KAUST Affiliations Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG).​ Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC). Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE). Education Profile Ph.D., Computer Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus, 2012. M.Sc., Computer Engineering, Eastern

Sara Althubaiti

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Sara Althubaiti is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Prior to this, Sara received her master's degree in computer science with a focus on bioinformatics from KAUST in December 2018. Research Interests Sara's research interests include bioinformatics, text mining, ontologies, and cancer. Her research focuses on applying machine learning methods in cancer biology and development specifically in the field of finding driver genes and mutations in

Rund Tawfiq

Ph.D. Student, Bioengineering
Research Interests My research interests include bioinformatics and using computational methods for data analysis in biology. I am interested in working on biological questions that require multi-omics data integration. I am also interested in neuropharmacology and the molecular biology underlying neuropsychiatric disorders. Professional Profile 2015-2019: Bachelor of Science in Biology, Psychology and Neuroscience; University of Massachusetts - Amherst 2019-2021: Master of Science in Bioscience; King Abdullah University of Science and Technology 2021-present: Ph.D. student; King Abdullah

Robert Hoehndorf

Associate Professor, Computer Science
Robert Hoehndorf is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at KAUST. His research focuses on bioinformatics, knowledge representation and reasoning, Semantic Web technologies, and neuro-symbolic methods.

Rahaf Shiqdar

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Rahaf Shiqdar was a visiting student from ​Umm Al-Qura University ​at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Rahaf's research interests included ​Bioinformatics, Machine and Deep learning.

Olga Mashkova

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
PhD student in Computer Science. Research interests: machine learning, bioinformatics, mathematics, knowledge representation and reasoning, deep learning, algorithms.

Omar Maddouri

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Research Interests: Biological networks and interactions

Maxat Kulmanov

Research Scientist, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Maxat Kulmanov is a Research Scientist in the Bio-Ontology Research Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Maxat's research interests include bioinformatics, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, neural networks, semantic web, and algorithms. He is interested in knowledge discovery and data integration using artificial intelligence and semantic web technologies in biology and biomedicine. Professional Profile 2020-Present: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Computational Bioscience Research Center, King Abdullah University of

MD Nurul Muttakin

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Nurul Muttakin, is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST Nurul completed his B.Sc. in CSE from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh. Research Interest Nurul is Interested in the application of Artificial Intelligence in Bioinformatics tasks like protein function prediction as well as understanding the theory behind it. Education Profile B.Sc. in CSE, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh

Luke Slater

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Luke Slater is working as a Research Fellow in the Institute of Cancer and Genomics with an interest in ontology and ontology accessories, and their combination with other interdisciplinary techniques to gain novel and practically useful insights into information.

Kexin Niu

Ph.D. Student, Bioengineering
Kexin Niu, is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST Kexin obtained her bachelor's degree in Bioinformatics from Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. "What I like best about KAUST is the communication of diverse cultures and diverse disciplines, which enables me to have more possibilities." Research Interest Kexin’ s Research interests include but are not limited to bioinformatics and application of machine learning method in biomedical data. Education Profile 2016 -

Fernando Patricio Zhapa-Camacho

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Fernando Patricio Zhapa Camacho is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the KAUST Bio-Ontology research group under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST, Fernando obtained a bachelor's degree in Information Technology from Yachay Tech University, Ecuador. Research Interests Fernando’s research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning and bioinformatics. He is interested in artificial intelligence and logic integration with applications in biology. Professional Profile: • 2020 to present: Graduate Student, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. •

Abeer Almutari

M.S. Student, Computer Science
Abeer Almutari obtained her Master's degree in Computer Science under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf at Bio-Ontology Research Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Research Interests Abeer's research interests included bioinformatics, machine learning and building new automated models using artificial intelligence. Education ​B.Sc. Electrical & Computer Engineering, King Abdul-Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2016

Abdullah Muhammad Kamal

Visiting Student, Computer Science
Abdullah Muhammad-Kamal is a visiting student from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom at (BORG) Bio-Ontology Research Group of Professor Robert Hoehndorf at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Currently on his placement year, interning with the Bio-Ontology Research Group at KAUST, he will be graduating with his Bachelor's degree in Computer and Management Sciences in the summer of 2021. Research Interests ​Abdullah's research interests include Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, and Data Science.
<> Computer science (11)

Knowledge-based methods in life sciences

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B9 L2 H2 R2325

In my research I aim to understand how formalized knowledge bases can be used to systematically structure and integrate biological knowledge, and how to utilize these formalized knowledge bases as background knowledge to improve scientific discovery in biology and biomedicine. To achieve these aims, I develop methods for representing, integrating, and analyzing data and knowledge with the specific aim to make the combination of data and formalized knowledge accessible to data analytics and machine learning in bioinformatics. Biomedicine, and life sciences in general, are an ideal domain for knowledge-driven data analysis methods due to the large number of formal knowledge bases that have been developed to capture the broad, diverse, and heterogeneous data and knowledge.

CBRC Dual Seminar - Analysis of COVID-19 Severity - DeepSVP computational method

Sakhaa Al-Saedi, PhD Student; Azza Althagafi, PhD Student

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KAUST

Sakhaa Al-Saedi: We conduct a systematic genetic analysis of risk variants related to increasing the severity of COVID-19. It leads to a better understanding of its genetic basis and identifies the host genes to be targeted to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and reduce its death toll. Azza Althagafi: We developed DeepSVP, a computational method to prioritize structural variants involved in genetic diseases by combining genomic and gene functions information. DeepSVP significantly improves the success rate of finding causative variants in several benchmarks and can identify novel pathogenic structural variants in consanguineous families.

Disease researchers have a way with words

1 min read ·
Specialized word search method sheds light on phenotypic similarity of diseases.

Algorithm scours datasets to diagnose medical mysteries

1 min read ·
A new tool uses genetic and clinical information to find the root cause of unexplained illnesses.

Database to support infectious disease research

1 min read ·
Linking disease pathogens to clinical signs and symptoms through a database could support research into the molecular mechanisms of infectious diseases.

Symbol of change for AI development

1 min read ·
Bridging the knowledge gap in artificial intelligence requires an embedding function that helps step between different types of "thinking."

Algorithm turns cancer gene discovery on its head

1 min read ·
A method for finding genes that spur tumor growth takes advantage of machine learning algorithms to sift through reams of molecular data collected from studies of cancer cell lines, mouse models and human patients.

MS Thesis Defense: Embedding Ontologies using Category Theory Semantics by Fernando Zhapa Camacho

1 min read ·
Fernando Patricio Zhapa Camacho an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the KAUST Bio-Ontology research group under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf successfully defended his thesis "Embedding Ontologies using Category Theory Semantics".

MS Thesis Defense | Learning 3D structures for protein function prediction

1 min read ·
Student Nurul Muttakin from the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Robert Hoehndorf successfully defends his Masters thesis. He presented his research on the topic " Learning 3D structures for protein function prediction".

PhD Dissertation Defense | Ontology design patterns and methods for integrating phenotype ontologies

1 min read ·
CBRC PhD student Sarah Alghamdi successfully defended her dissertation last week. She has been an essential member of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) since 2015.Her research interests include the applications of artificial intelligence and statistical methods to genomics and healthcare.

PhD Dissertation Defense | Prioritizing Causative Genomic Variants by Integrating Molecular and Functional Annotations from Multiple Biomedical Ontologies

1 min read ·
CBRC PhD Student Azza Althagafi successfully defends her dissertation under the supervision of Associate Professor Robert Hoehndorf. She has been a member of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) since 2016. Her research interest lies in the crossroads of computer science and biology, leveraging AI techniques to explore the human genome's intricacies and its link to various diseases.
<> Ontologies (9)

AI4GH Seminar Series| Artificial Intelligence for Genomics and Health: Introduction and Overview

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B2 R5220

Abstract Genomics and health are prime areas for the development and application of novel intelligent algorithms due to a large amount of available research data, the high complexity of the problem, and the significant social and economic benefits of improving health outcomes in humans. In the past, genomics and health have been one of the key drivers in the development of Artificial Intelligence methods, including machine learning, expert systems, or graph-based algorithms. I will introduce the new seminar series on Artificial Intelligence for Genomics and Health (AI4GH), and then discuss our

Ontology Design Patterns for Combining Pathology and Anatomy: Application to Study Ageing and Longevity in Inbred Mouse Strains

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B9 R3120

Abstract In biomedical research, ontologies are widely used to represent knowledge as well as annotate datasets. Many of the existing ontologies cover a single type of phenomena, such as a process, cell type, gene, pathological entity or anatomical structure. Consequently, it is required to use multiple ontologies to fully characterize the observations in the datasets. Although this allows precise annotation of different aspects of a given dataset, it limits our ability to use the ontologies in data analysis, as the ontologies are usually disconnected and their combination cannot be exploited

AI4GH Seminar Series - Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B2 R5220

Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge.

Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B3 R5209

Abstract Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge. Accurate identification of driver genes and driver mutations is critical for advancing cancer research and personalizing treatment based on accurate stratification of patients. Due to inter-tumor genetic heterogeneity, many driver mutations within a gene occur at low frequencies, which make it challenging to distinguish them from other non-driver mutations. Motivated by these challenges, we

How much do model organism phenotypes contribute to the computational identification of human disease genes?

1 min read ·
PhD Student Sarah M Alghamdi from the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) explains how phenotype ontologies help in identifying disease genes through phenotype comparison. Her research was picked as a highlight in the July 2022 issue of Disease Models and Mechanisms Journal.

PhD Dissertation Defense | Ontology design patterns and methods for integrating phenotype ontologies

1 min read ·
CBRC PhD student Sarah Alghamdi successfully defended her dissertation last week. She has been an essential member of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) since 2015.Her research interests include the applications of artificial intelligence and statistical methods to genomics and healthcare.

Sara Althubaiti

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Sara Althubaiti is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Prior to this, Sara received her master's degree in computer science with a focus on bioinformatics from KAUST in December 2018. Research Interests Sara's research interests include bioinformatics, text mining, ontologies, and cancer. Her research focuses on applying machine learning methods in cancer biology and development specifically in the field of finding driver genes and mutations in

Salwa Al Ahmari

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Salwa Al Ahmari was a visiting student ​at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). During her six months (Jan 2016 – Jun 2016) internship at KAUST, she worked on text mining techniques for Ontologies in CBRC.

Patrick Westphal

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Patrick Westphal was a visiting student at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). During his three months (Jan 2016 – Mar 2016) internship at the Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), he worked with the Bio-Ontology Research Group where he contributed to different projects aiming at finding correlations and causalities in relations between genotypes and phenotypes, and genes, diseases, and drugs. The applied techniques were usually backed by OWL ontologies or knowledge bases expressed in other
<> text mining (8)

AI4GH Seminar Series - Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B2 R5220

Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge.

AI4GH Seminar Series - Large-scale Text and Data Integration for Cancer Genomics Research

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B19 L3 H2

Prof. Rebholz-Schuhmann has long-term experience in semantics driven data analytics research, as well in life sciences as in other domains.

Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B3 R5209

Abstract Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge. Accurate identification of driver genes and driver mutations is critical for advancing cancer research and personalizing treatment based on accurate stratification of patients. Due to inter-tumor genetic heterogeneity, many driver mutations within a gene occur at low frequencies, which make it challenging to distinguish them from other non-driver mutations. Motivated by these challenges, we

Large-scale Text and Data Integration for Cancer Genomics Research

Prof. D, Rebholz-Schuhmann (University Cologne, Germany​)​

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B19 L3 H2

Abstract This talk will give an overview of data and text mining in the life science domain, but will also point out the use of semantic technologies for other domains. Such solutions cover the integration of heterogeneous data sources based on Semantic Web standards (e.g., TCGA, Cosmic, others), the development of smart technologies (e.g., stream processing), graph and literature analytics, and open data initiatives. Application domains are biomedical solutions in cancer genomics and targeted projects together with industrial partners exploiting Semantic Web technologies in general. The

Sara Althubaiti defends her Master's thesis

1 min read ·
Sara Althubaiti, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 5, 2018.

Sarah Alqabbaa

Visiting Student, Computer Science
Sarah Alqabbaa was a visiting student from Effat University ​at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Sara Althubaiti

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Sara Althubaiti is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Prior to this, Sara received her master's degree in computer science with a focus on bioinformatics from KAUST in December 2018. Research Interests Sara's research interests include bioinformatics, text mining, ontologies, and cancer. Her research focuses on applying machine learning methods in cancer biology and development specifically in the field of finding driver genes and mutations in

Salwa Al Ahmari

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Salwa Al Ahmari was a visiting student ​at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). During her six months (Jan 2016 – Jun 2016) internship at KAUST, she worked on text mining techniques for Ontologies in CBRC.
<> data analysis (7)

Nizar Ajeeb

Full Time Researcher Full at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Bio-ontologies and their role in analyzing personal genome data

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KAUST

The aim of the tutorial is to introduce recent advances in using biomedical ontologies for data analysis, in particular for the interpretation of personal genome data and identifying causal variants underlying a phenotype or disease.

Ontology Design Patterns for Combining Pathology and Anatomy: Application to Study Ageing and Longevity in Inbred Mouse Strains

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B9 R3120

Abstract In biomedical research, ontologies are widely used to represent knowledge as well as annotate datasets. Many of the existing ontologies cover a single type of phenomena, such as a process, cell type, gene, pathological entity or anatomical structure. Consequently, it is required to use multiple ontologies to fully characterize the observations in the datasets. Although this allows precise annotation of different aspects of a given dataset, it limits our ability to use the ontologies in data analysis, as the ontologies are usually disconnected and their combination cannot be exploited

AI4GH Seminar Series - Vector Representation of Biological Entities Based on Ontologies and Their Annotations

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B2 R5220

Biological knowledge is widely represented in the form of ontology-based annotations: ontologies describe the phenomena assumed to exist within a domain, and the annotations associate a biological entity with a set of phenomena within the domain.

Neuro-symbolic systems in the life sciences

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B9 H1 R2322

Abstract The life sciences have invested significant resources in the development and application of semantic technologies to make research data accessible and interlinked, and to enable the integration and analysis of data. Utilizing the semantics associated with research data in data analysis approaches is often challenging. Now, novel methods are becoming available that combine symbolic methods and statistical methods in Artificial Intelligence. In my talk, I will describe how to generate knowledge graph embeddings for analysis of biological and biomedical data. Brief Biography Robert

Yang Liu

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Yang Liu is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the KAUST Bio-Ontology research group under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST. Research Interests Yang's interests include bioinformatics, machine learning and human genomics. She is interested in building models for human disease diagnosis and prognosis, especially for cancer, and applying statistical methods to analyze human omics data. Education Profile B.Sc, Bioengineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, 2016-2020. M.Sc, Bioengineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi

Olga Chechekina

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Olga Chechekina is a visiting student in the Bio-Ontology Research Group under the supervision of Prof. Robert Hoehndorf. Prior to visiting KAUST, she graduated from "Biology and Biotechnology" department at HSE University in 2023, and completed an internship at Genome Institute of Singapore in 2022. Here research interests are in metagenomics, molecular biology and data analysis.
<> Deep learning (7) <> biomedicine (6)

AI4GH Seminar Series | Predicting Protein Function and Phenotype Associations

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B2 R5220

The amount of available protein sequences is rapidly increasing, mainly as a consequence of the development and application of high ​throughput sequencing technologies in the life sciences.

AI4GH Seminar Series| Artificial Intelligence for Genomics and Health: Introduction and Overview

-

B2 R5220

Abstract Genomics and health are prime areas for the development and application of novel intelligent algorithms due to a large amount of available research data, the high complexity of the problem, and the significant social and economic benefits of improving health outcomes in humans. In the past, genomics and health have been one of the key drivers in the development of Artificial Intelligence methods, including machine learning, expert systems, or graph-based algorithms. I will introduce the new seminar series on Artificial Intelligence for Genomics and Health (AI4GH), and then discuss our

Ontology Design Patterns for Combining Pathology and Anatomy: Application to Study Ageing and Longevity in Inbred Mouse Strains

-

B9 R3120

Abstract In biomedical research, ontologies are widely used to represent knowledge as well as annotate datasets. Many of the existing ontologies cover a single type of phenomena, such as a process, cell type, gene, pathological entity or anatomical structure. Consequently, it is required to use multiple ontologies to fully characterize the observations in the datasets. Although this allows precise annotation of different aspects of a given dataset, it limits our ability to use the ontologies in data analysis, as the ontologies are usually disconnected and their combination cannot be exploited

Causality-based new drug development: Some successful cases and a new challenge

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B2 L5 R5209

Abstract The success rate of new drug development is extremely low. It is even lower when the new drug has a novel mechanism of action. From my experience, I propose that the success rate can be dramatically increased by predicting the effects of a drug in humans based on the causality-confirmed data. It is dangerous to develop new drugs based on the data in which causality is not confirmed. In biology, there are three different types of relationships in which the causality is confirmed, i.e. the relationships between parent and child, between gene and phenotype and between intervention and

Accelerating biomedical discovery with an Internet of FAIR data and services

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B9 L2 H1 R2322

In this talk, I will discuss our work to create computational standards, platforms, and methods to wrangle knowledge into simple, but effective representations based on semantic web technologies that are maximally FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reuseable - and to further use these for biomedical knowledge discovery. But only with additional crucial developments will this emerging Internet of FAIR data and services enable automated scientific discovery on a global scale.

Disease researchers have a way with words

1 min read ·
Specialized word search method sheds light on phenotypic similarity of diseases.
<> data mining (6)

Large-scale Text and Data Integration for Cancer Genomics Research

Prof. D, Rebholz-Schuhmann (University Cologne, Germany​)​

-

B19 L3 H2

Abstract This talk will give an overview of data and text mining in the life science domain, but will also point out the use of semantic technologies for other domains. Such solutions cover the integration of heterogeneous data sources based on Semantic Web standards (e.g., TCGA, Cosmic, others), the development of smart technologies (e.g., stream processing), graph and literature analytics, and open data initiatives. Application domains are biomedical solutions in cancer genomics and targeted projects together with industrial partners exploiting Semantic Web technologies in general. The

Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

-

KAUST Hotel

Bioinformatics experts, Don’t miss the opportunity to collaborate with researchers and field professionals in the BioHackathonMENA2023 event. BioHackathon events involve a large number of people that meet on-site to discuss ideas and implement projects in a collaborative manner during intensive coding sessions.

Sarah Alghamdi defends her master's thesis

1 min read ·
Sarah Alghamdi successfully defended her master's thesis on April 10, 2018. Her project, entitled "Ontology Design Patterns for Combining Pathology and Anatomy: Application to Study Ageing and Longevity in Inbred Mouse Strains", was well-received by a panel of professors that included Professor Vladimir Bajic, Associate Professor Xin Gao and Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf.

Senay Kafkas

Research Scientist, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Research Interests Senay's research interests include biomedical text/data mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data analysis. Scientific and Professional Membership ​International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) (2010-present). KAUST Affiliations Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG).​ Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC). Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE). Education Profile Ph.D., Computer Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus, 2012. M.Sc., Computer Engineering, Eastern

Luke Slater

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Luke Slater is working as a Research Fellow in the Institute of Cancer and Genomics with an interest in ontology and ontology accessories, and their combination with other interdisciplinary techniques to gain novel and practically useful insights into information.

Azza Althagafi

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Azza Althagafi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Professional Profile ​2016 to present Graduate Student, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. 2015 - 2016: Teaching Assistant, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia. 2014 – 2015: Volunteer Teaching Assistant, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. 2013 – 2016: Assistant Trainer, Mawhiba, The King Abdulaziz and His Companions' Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Scientific and
<> genomics (6)

VSIM: Visualization and Simulation of Genomes for Premarital Testing

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B3 L5 R5209

Abstract Interpretation and simulation of the large-scale genomics data are very challenging, and currently, many web tools have been developed to analyze genomic variation which supports automated visualization of a variety of high throughput genomics data. We have developed VSIM an automated and easy to use web application for interpretation and visualization of a variety of genomics data, it identifies the candidate disease variants by referencing to four databases Clinvar, GWAS, DIDA, and PharmGKB, and predicted the pathogenic variants. Moreover, it investigates the attitude towards

AI4GH Seminar Series - VSIM: Visualization and Simulation of Genomes for Premarital Testing

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B2 R5220

Interpretation and simulation of the large-scale genomics data are very challenging, and currently, many web tools have been developed to analyze genomic variation which supports automated visualization of a variety of high throughput genomics data.

Large-scale Text and Data Integration for Cancer Genomics Research

Prof. D, Rebholz-Schuhmann (University Cologne, Germany​)​

-

B19 L3 H2

Abstract This talk will give an overview of data and text mining in the life science domain, but will also point out the use of semantic technologies for other domains. Such solutions cover the integration of heterogeneous data sources based on Semantic Web standards (e.g., TCGA, Cosmic, others), the development of smart technologies (e.g., stream processing), graph and literature analytics, and open data initiatives. Application domains are biomedical solutions in cancer genomics and targeted projects together with industrial partners exploiting Semantic Web technologies in general. The

Azza Althagafi defends her Master's thesis

1 min read ·
Azza Althagafi, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 1, 2018.

Studying COVID-19’s envelope protein

1 min read ·
A likeness between genes of the SARS and COVID-19 viruses could inform research into potential treatments.

Sarah Alghamdi

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Sarah Alghamdi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Research Interests Sarah's research interests include applications of artificial intelligence and using statistical methods to genomics and healthcare. Professional Profile Program Committee for the International Conference of Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2022) Program Committee for the International Society of Molecular Biology (ISMB 2022) - Bio-Ontology track 2018-2021: Teaching Assistant positions: CS
<> big data (5)

Bio2Vec Kickoff Meeting

-

Paris France

​​Research Scientist Senay Kafkas will be attending the Bio2Vec kickoff meeting in Paris, France.

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

1 min read ·
​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.

The awesome scope of big data

1 min read ·
Sifting through huge amounts of data may bring a better understanding of whale shark social structures, protein targets for drug therapies and disease-causing genes.

Exploring science's fourth paradigm

1 min read ·
The recent KAUST Research Conference: Computational and Statistical Interface to Big Data brought together leading computer science researchers and statistical experts to discuss the current state and future of data science. Held on campus from March 19 to 21, the conference covered such data science topics as succinct data representation and storage; big data visualization; parallel and distributed algorithms for inference and optimization; and analysis of large graphs and networks.

Ashraf M. Kibriya

Research Interests ​My research interests include the application of Big Data and Machine Learning techniques to real-world problems in various domains, including biology and biomedicine. In particular, I'm interested in Deep Learning, Text Mining, Network Analysis and Graph Mining. Professional Profile ​2018-Present: Postdoctoral Fellow, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia 2011-2018: Doctoral Fellow, KU Leuven, Belgium 2010-2011: Pre-doctoral fellow, KU Leuven, Belgium 2007-2009: Database developer / Datamining specialist, Datamine Ltd., New Zealand 2002-2005: Research Programmer, Machine Learning
<> biology (5)

AI4GH Seminar Series | Predicting Protein Function and Phenotype Associations

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B2 R5220

The amount of available protein sequences is rapidly increasing, mainly as a consequence of the development and application of high ​throughput sequencing technologies in the life sciences.

AI4GH Seminar Series| Artificial Intelligence for Genomics and Health: Introduction and Overview

-

B2 R5220

Abstract Genomics and health are prime areas for the development and application of novel intelligent algorithms due to a large amount of available research data, the high complexity of the problem, and the significant social and economic benefits of improving health outcomes in humans. In the past, genomics and health have been one of the key drivers in the development of Artificial Intelligence methods, including machine learning, expert systems, or graph-based algorithms. I will introduce the new seminar series on Artificial Intelligence for Genomics and Health (AI4GH), and then discuss our

Disease researchers have a way with words

1 min read ·
Specialized word search method sheds light on phenotypic similarity of diseases.

The awesome scope of big data

1 min read ·
Sifting through huge amounts of data may bring a better understanding of whale shark social structures, protein targets for drug therapies and disease-causing genes.

PhD Dissertation Defense | Prioritizing Causative Genomic Variants by Integrating Molecular and Functional Annotations from Multiple Biomedical Ontologies

1 min read ·
CBRC PhD Student Azza Althagafi successfully defends her dissertation under the supervision of Associate Professor Robert Hoehndorf. She has been a member of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) since 2016. Her research interest lies in the crossroads of computer science and biology, leveraging AI techniques to explore the human genome's intricacies and its link to various diseases.
<> biomedical data (5)

Neuro-symbolic systems in the life sciences

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B9 H1 R2322

Abstract The life sciences have invested significant resources in the development and application of semantic technologies to make research data accessible and interlinked, and to enable the integration and analysis of data. Utilizing the semantics associated with research data in data analysis approaches is often challenging. Now, novel methods are becoming available that combine symbolic methods and statistical methods in Artificial Intelligence. In my talk, I will describe how to generate knowledge graph embeddings for analysis of biological and biomedical data. Brief Biography Robert

Professor Robert Hoehndorf's PhenomeNET method wins at Ontology matching workshop

1 min read ·
Professor Robert Hoehndorf and Postdoctoral Fellow Miguel Angel Rodriguez Garcia are the winners of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative Challenge sponsored by Pistoia Alliance.

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

1 min read ·
​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.

Robert Hoehndorf promoted to associate professor at KAUST

1 min read ·
KAUST faculty member Robert Hoehndorf was recently promoted from the rank of assistant professor to associate professor. Hoehndorf’s promotion caps a year-long process where the German researcher’s scientific and scholarly output was measured and evaluated by internal and external reviews.

Robert Hoehndorf

Associate Professor, Computer Science
Robert Hoehndorf is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at KAUST. His research focuses on bioinformatics, knowledge representation and reasoning, Semantic Web technologies, and neuro-symbolic methods.
<> cancer (5)

AI4GH Seminar Series - Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B2 R5220

Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge.

Variant Prioritization in Cancer: Understanding and Prediction of Cancer Driver Genes and Mutations

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B3 R5209

Abstract Sequencing has identified millions of somatic mutations in human cancers. Identifying and distinguishing cancer driver genes amongst the millions of candidate mutations remains a major challenge. Accurate identification of driver genes and driver mutations is critical for advancing cancer research and personalizing treatment based on accurate stratification of patients. Due to inter-tumor genetic heterogeneity, many driver mutations within a gene occur at low frequencies, which make it challenging to distinguish them from other non-driver mutations. Motivated by these challenges, we

Sara Althubaiti defends her Master's thesis

1 min read ·
Sara Althubaiti, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 5, 2018.

Algorithm turns cancer gene discovery on its head

1 min read ·
A method for finding genes that spur tumor growth takes advantage of machine learning algorithms to sift through reams of molecular data collected from studies of cancer cell lines, mouse models and human patients.

Sara Althubaiti

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Sara Althubaiti is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Prior to this, Sara received her master's degree in computer science with a focus on bioinformatics from KAUST in December 2018. Research Interests Sara's research interests include bioinformatics, text mining, ontologies, and cancer. Her research focuses on applying machine learning methods in cancer biology and development specifically in the field of finding driver genes and mutations in
<> data integration (5)

AI4GH Seminar Series | Predicting Protein Function and Phenotype Associations

-

B2 R5220

The amount of available protein sequences is rapidly increasing, mainly as a consequence of the development and application of high ​throughput sequencing technologies in the life sciences.

AI4GH Seminar Series - Machine Learning with Biological Knowledge Graphs

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B2 R5220

Abstract Biological data and knowledge bases increasingly rely on Semantic Web technologies and the use of knowledge graphs for data integration, retrieval, and federated queries. In the past years, feature learning methods that are applicable to graph-structured data are becoming available, but have not yet widely been applied and evaluated on structured biological knowledge. We develop novel methods for feature learning on biological knowledge graphs and apply them to the prediction of edges in the knowledge graph representing problems of finding candidate genes of diseases, or drugs

Mona Alshahrani defends her thesis proposal

1 min read ·
Mona Alshahrani, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her thesis proposal on October 10, 2018.

Senay Kafkas

Research Scientist, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Research Interests Senay's research interests include biomedical text/data mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data analysis. Scientific and Professional Membership ​International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) (2010-present). KAUST Affiliations Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG).​ Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC). Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE). Education Profile Ph.D., Computer Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus, 2012. M.Sc., Computer Engineering, Eastern

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
<> human health (5)

AI4GH Seminar Series - Machine Learning with Biological Knowledge Graphs

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B2 R5220

Abstract Biological data and knowledge bases increasingly rely on Semantic Web technologies and the use of knowledge graphs for data integration, retrieval, and federated queries. In the past years, feature learning methods that are applicable to graph-structured data are becoming available, but have not yet widely been applied and evaluated on structured biological knowledge. We develop novel methods for feature learning on biological knowledge graphs and apply them to the prediction of edges in the knowledge graph representing problems of finding candidate genes of diseases, or drugs

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

1 min read ·
​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.

Database to support infectious disease research

1 min read ·
Linking disease pathogens to clinical signs and symptoms through a database could support research into the molecular mechanisms of infectious diseases.

Algorithm turns cancer gene discovery on its head

1 min read ·
A method for finding genes that spur tumor growth takes advantage of machine learning algorithms to sift through reams of molecular data collected from studies of cancer cell lines, mouse models and human patients.

Studying COVID-19’s envelope protein

1 min read ·
A likeness between genes of the SARS and COVID-19 viruses could inform research into potential treatments.
<> bioscience (4) <> Computer Vision (4) <> healthcare (4)

Babar Khan

Ph.D. (former), Bioscience
Ph.D. degree in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Ahsan Mehmood

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

Sarah Alghamdi

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Sarah Alghamdi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Research Interests Sarah's research interests include applications of artificial intelligence and using statistical methods to genomics and healthcare. Professional Profile Program Committee for the International Conference of Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2022) Program Committee for the International Society of Molecular Biology (ISMB 2022) - Bio-Ontology track 2018-2021: Teaching Assistant positions: CS

Adeeb Noor

Visiting Professor, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Adeeb Noor is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at King Abdulaziz University (KAU), where he is the founder of the King Abdulaziz University Hospital patients portal (SHIFAA). He is also a visiting professor and part of the Bio-Ontology Research Group in KAUST. Research Interests Dr. Noor areas of research include but are not limited to data and business governance, healthcare digital transformation, drug-drug interactions, and personalized medicine. Selected Publications​ Agent-enabled task offloading in UAV-aided mobile edge computing, R Wang, Y Cao, A Noor, TA Alamoudi, R Nour -
<> ontology (4)

Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

-

KAUST Hotel

Bioinformatics experts, Don’t miss the opportunity to collaborate with researchers and field professionals in the BioHackathonMENA2023 event. BioHackathon events involve a large number of people that meet on-site to discuss ideas and implement projects in a collaborative manner during intensive coding sessions.

​PhenomeNET method wins at Ontology matching workshop

1 min read ·
CBRC congratulates Professor Robert Hoehndorf and Postdoctoral Fellow Miguel Angel Rodriguez Garcia for being one of the winners of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative challenge sponsored by Pistoia Alliance, presented in the Ontology Matching Workshop that is co-located with ISWC 2016 in Kobe, Japan.

CBRC goes to ECCB 2018

1 min read ·
The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) is one of the most important conferences in the field of bioinformatics and computational biology. Held in a different European city annually, this year's conference will take place in the historic city of Athens, Greece on September 8-12, 2018.

BORG team win at the KAUST-NVIDIA GPU Hackathon 2022

1 min read ·
Congratulations to Senay Kafkas, Maxat Kulmanov and Fernando Zhapa Camacho of the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) on winning at the KAUST-NVIDIA GPU Hackathon 2022. The 8th edition of the Hackathon on Accelerating Scientific Applications using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) was held at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), twelve teams of students and researchers enjoyed the opportunity to accelerate their codes in GPU’s under the guidance of expert mentors of NVIDIA, Codee, KAUST Supercomputing Lab (KSL) and KAUST core labs.
<> semantic technologies (4)

AI4GH Seminar Series - Large-scale Text and Data Integration for Cancer Genomics Research

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B19 L3 H2

Prof. Rebholz-Schuhmann has long-term experience in semantics driven data analytics research, as well in life sciences as in other domains.

Large-scale Text and Data Integration for Cancer Genomics Research

Prof. D, Rebholz-Schuhmann (University Cologne, Germany​)​

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B19 L3 H2

Abstract This talk will give an overview of data and text mining in the life science domain, but will also point out the use of semantic technologies for other domains. Such solutions cover the integration of heterogeneous data sources based on Semantic Web standards (e.g., TCGA, Cosmic, others), the development of smart technologies (e.g., stream processing), graph and literature analytics, and open data initiatives. Application domains are biomedical solutions in cancer genomics and targeted projects together with industrial partners exploiting Semantic Web technologies in general. The

Accelerating biomedical discovery with an Internet of FAIR data and services

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B9 L2 H1 R2322

In this talk, I will discuss our work to create computational standards, platforms, and methods to wrangle knowledge into simple, but effective representations based on semantic web technologies that are maximally FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reuseable - and to further use these for biomedical knowledge discovery. But only with additional crucial developments will this emerging Internet of FAIR data and services enable automated scientific discovery on a global scale.

Patrick Westphal

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Patrick Westphal was a visiting student at Professor Robert Hoehndorf's Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). During his three months (Jan 2016 – Mar 2016) internship at the Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), he worked with the Bio-Ontology Research Group where he contributed to different projects aiming at finding correlations and causalities in relations between genotypes and phenotypes, and genes, diseases, and drugs. The applied techniques were usually backed by OWL ontologies or knowledge bases expressed in other
<> Signal processing (4) <> AI (3) <> computational methods (3) <> genome (3)

AI4GH Seminar Series - Computational Modeling of Malaria Metabolism Reveals Different Stages and Species Nutrient Preferences and Drug Targets

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B2 R5220

Malaria kills nearly one-half million people a year and over 1 billion people are at risk of becoming infected by the parasite. Plasmodial infections are difficult to treat for a myriad of reasons, but the ability of the organism to remain latent in hosts and the complex life cycles greatly contributed to the difficulty in treat malaria.

Former KAUST VSRP student wins Best Talk Award at ISMB 2020

1 min read ·
Runar Reve, a former KAUST Visiting Student Research Program (VSRP) student, recently received the International Society for Computational Biology’s (ISCB) Bio-Ontologies COSI – Best Talk Award at the 28th Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2020.

Runar Reve

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
​Runar Reve is from Klepp, Rogaland, in Norway. He is currently in his industry year as a visiting student for his bachelor's degree in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Aberystwyth University in Wales and will obtain his degree by the summer of 2021. He is currently working with Professor Robert Hoehndorf Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) on genome-wide association study (GWAS) to find variants, or sets of variants, in genomes that can result in genetic disease.​ Research Interests Genome-Wide Association Studies​. Education ​Undergrad in Artificial Intelligence (with integrated year
<> knowledge representation (3)

Knowledge-based methods in life sciences

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B9 L2 H2 R2325

In my research I aim to understand how formalized knowledge bases can be used to systematically structure and integrate biological knowledge, and how to utilize these formalized knowledge bases as background knowledge to improve scientific discovery in biology and biomedicine. To achieve these aims, I develop methods for representing, integrating, and analyzing data and knowledge with the specific aim to make the combination of data and formalized knowledge accessible to data analytics and machine learning in bioinformatics. Biomedicine, and life sciences in general, are an ideal domain for knowledge-driven data analysis methods due to the large number of formal knowledge bases that have been developed to capture the broad, diverse, and heterogeneous data and knowledge.

Robert Hoehndorf

Associate Professor, Computer Science
Robert Hoehndorf is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at KAUST. His research focuses on bioinformatics, knowledge representation and reasoning, Semantic Web technologies, and neuro-symbolic methods.

Olga Mashkova

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
PhD student in Computer Science. Research interests: machine learning, bioinformatics, mathematics, knowledge representation and reasoning, deep learning, algorithms.
<> Knowledge representation and reasoning (3)

MS Thesis Defense: Description Logic EL++Embeddings with Intersectional Closure by Xi Peng

1 min read ·
Xi Peng MS Student under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf successfully defended his thesis "Description Logic EL++Embeddings with Intersectional Closure"

Xi Peng

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Xi Peng likes pop music and doing sports. He graduated from SUSTech in 2021 and planning to continue his academic career at KAUST under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. "He says KAUST has the best environment to do research. Life in KAUST is also comfortable. I believe I can achieve a lot in KAUST". Research Interest applications of machine learning and logic integration in biology Education Profile B.Sc, Computer Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China, 2017-2021 M.Sc, Computer Science, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal

Fernando Patricio Zhapa-Camacho

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Fernando Patricio Zhapa Camacho is an M.S./Ph.D. candidate in the KAUST Bio-Ontology research group under the supervision of Professor Robert Hoehndorf. Before joining KAUST, Fernando obtained a bachelor's degree in Information Technology from Yachay Tech University, Ecuador. Research Interests Fernando’s research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning and bioinformatics. He is interested in artificial intelligence and logic integration with applications in biology. Professional Profile: • 2020 to present: Graduate Student, KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. •
<> MATLAB (3) <> neural network (3) <> Neuro-Symbolic AI (3) <> phenotype ontologies (3)

Ontology design patterns and methods for integrating phenotype ontologies

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B3 L5 R5209.

Ontologies are widely used in various domains, including biomedical research, to structure information, represent knowledge, and analyze data. Combining ontologies from different domains is crucial for systematic data analysis and comparison of similar domains. This requires ontology composition, integration, and alignment, which involve creating new classes by reusing classes from different domains, aggregating types of ontologies within the same domain, and finding correspondences between ontologies within the same or similar domain.

​PhenomeNET method wins at Ontology matching workshop

1 min read ·
CBRC congratulates Professor Robert Hoehndorf and Postdoctoral Fellow Miguel Angel Rodriguez Garcia for being one of the winners of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative challenge sponsored by Pistoia Alliance, presented in the Ontology Matching Workshop that is co-located with ISWC 2016 in Kobe, Japan.

How much do model organism phenotypes contribute to the computational identification of human disease genes?

1 min read ·
PhD Student Sarah M Alghamdi from the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG) explains how phenotype ontologies help in identifying disease genes through phenotype comparison. Her research was picked as a highlight in the July 2022 issue of Disease Models and Mechanisms Journal.
<> structural biology (3)

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.

KAUST Research Conference 2023 on Computational Advances in Structural Biology

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B4 B5 A0215

Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) is pleased to announce the KAUST Research Conference 2023 on Computational Advances in Structural Biology. The conference will be held from May 1-3, 2023 at the Auditorium between Building 4 & 5. The visualization of the structure of a molecule, organelle or larger entity is key to understanding its biological function. Thus, structural biology is an extremely powerful means of unraveling the fundaments of life, but also of diseases. Consequently, structural biology is at the heart of medical therapies, including drug design, and has enabled the

Student Poster Competition: The KAUST Research Conference on Computational Advances in Structural Biology

-

B9 Hallway

The Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) will be holding a student poster competition as part of its yearly conference. This poster competition is open to KAUST students whose research is relevant to the conference theme ‘Computational Advances in Structural Biology’. To register, please click on the register button below. Once registered, you will receive instructions and submission codes for uploading your poster electronically. Register The deadline for submissions is April 1, 2023. The poster competition will be judged by an external panel of experts, and prizes will be awarded
<> AI4Science (2) <> applied mathematics (2) <> bio-ontology (2) <> bioengineering (2) <> biotechnology (2) <> comparative genomics (2) <> computational analysis (2) <> Computational biology (2) <> functional prediction (2)

Semantic Prioritization of Novel Causative Genomic Variants in Mendelian and Oligogenic Diseases

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B9 R4223

Abstract Recent advances in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies have facilitated the generation of massive amounts of genomic data which in turn is bringing the promise that personalized medicine will soon become widely available. As a result, there is an increasing pressure to develop computational tools to analyze and interpret genomic data. In this dissertation, we present a systematic approach for interrogating patients' genomes to identify candidate causal genomic variants of Mendelian and oligogenic diseases. To achieve that, we leverage the use of biomedical data available

Imane Boudellioua

Imane Boudellioua 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). Imene has a Master's degree in Computer Science from KAUST. During Master's her thesis supervisor was Professor Basem Shihada. Thesis title: " A Vehicular Guidance Wireless Sensor Actuator Network." Research Interests Imane Boudellioua's research interests include the application of machine learning and data mining algorithms for functional annotation of various biological
<> genetic variation (2)

Semantic Prioritization of Novel Causative Genomic Variants in Mendelian and Oligogenic Diseases

-

B9 R4223

Abstract Recent advances in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies have facilitated the generation of massive amounts of genomic data which in turn is bringing the promise that personalized medicine will soon become widely available. As a result, there is an increasing pressure to develop computational tools to analyze and interpret genomic data. In this dissertation, we present a systematic approach for interrogating patients' genomes to identify candidate causal genomic variants of Mendelian and oligogenic diseases. To achieve that, we leverage the use of biomedical data available

Imane Boudellioua

Imane Boudellioua 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). Imene has a Master's degree in Computer Science from KAUST. During Master's her thesis supervisor was Professor Basem Shihada. Thesis title: " A Vehicular Guidance Wireless Sensor Actuator Network." Research Interests Imane Boudellioua's research interests include the application of machine learning and data mining algorithms for functional annotation of various biological
<> human bioinformatics (2) <> IoT (2) <> Localization (2) <> Metagenomics (2)

Characterization of Natural Bacterial Pathogens with Genomic and Predictive Modelling

Dr. Danesh Moradigaravand, Infectious Disease Epidemiology lab, BESE, KAUST

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B3 L5 R5209

In this talk, I will first present how the application of phylogenetic and phylodynamic methods to whole genome sequencing data of multidrug resistant bacterial pathogens provided an in-depth understanding of the epidemiology and evolution of these strains on epidemiological time scales. I will then discuss the characterization of the genomic repertoire of bacterial traits using a combination of machine learning, whole genome sequencing and large-scale phenotypic assays. I will then present the leverage of predictive modelling to predict bacterial features, e.g. antimicrobial resistance, growth, and horizontal gene transfer, from genomic biomarkers. I will finally discuss how large-scale phenotypic assays enabled us to identity genes underlying morphogenesis and biofilm formation.

Olga Chechekina

Visiting Student, Bio-Ontology Research Group
Olga Chechekina is a visiting student in the Bio-Ontology Research Group under the supervision of Prof. Robert Hoehndorf. Prior to visiting KAUST, she graduated from "Biology and Biotechnology" department at HSE University in 2023, and completed an internship at Genome Institute of Singapore in 2022. Here research interests are in metagenomics, molecular biology and data analysis.
<> Network Design (2) <> optimization (2) <> PhenomeNET (2) <> Programming language (2) <> protein function prediction (2)