Seminar on an INSPIRE project titled “Advances in Algorithms for Next Generation Biological Sequences”:

A Seminar was held at the Information Access Center, Department of CSE, BUET on Saturday (09 September 2014) as part of an INSPIRE project titled “Advances in Algorithms for Next Generation Biological Sequences” administered by the British Council, Bangladesh. This is an ongoing project between the BUET team led by Prof. M. Sohel Rahman and the King’s College London (KCL) team led by eminent scientist Prof. Costas Iliopoulos. The seminar was mostly informal and conducted by Prof. Sohel Rahman. It started with a brief presentation by him on the project objective and status followed by a brief exposition of the latest research finding arising out of this project on circular DNA matching by Mr. M. Samiruzzaman (PhD student of Prof. Iliopoulos at King’s). Prof. Iliopoulos then conducted a vibrant session of open problems where he discussed three different problems with applications in different branches of science, namely, Medical Science, Computational Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics, Stringology and Mobile Computing.
Prof. M. Kaykobad, Prof. Md. Saidur Rahman, both Fellows of Bangladesh Academy of Sciences and Professors of CSE department BUET were present during the event. Researchers from different institutes including Dhaka University, ICDDRB and faculty members and researchers of CSE and different other departments of BUET including the Department of Physics and Department of Chemical Engineering were present to grace the occasion. Prof. Haseena Begum, Professor, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, University of Dhaka and Fellow, Bangladesh Academy of Sciences also briefly discussed some open problems during the seminar. The seminar ended with informal discussions among Prof. Iliopoulos, Prof. Sohel Rahman and other distinguished researchers and students present at the event on different matters of mutual interest, including but not limited to, new research and funding opportunities, further future possible collaborations etc.
It may be noted that the visit of Prof. Costas Iliopoulos and his team comprising Mr. Tanver Athar and Mr. M. Samiruzzaman has been supported by the INSPIRE project mentioned above administered by the British Council, Bangladesh. During the week-long visit by the UK team both the teams are expected to work further towards attaining the project objectives as well as to explore further possible collaboration opportunities through joint funding applications.

Posted on: [2014-09-09]