Regina Barzilay
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
MIT
Title: Modeling Chemistry for Drug Discovery: Current State and Unsolved Challenges
Speaker: Regina Barzilay, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Abstract:
Until today, all the available therapeutics are designed by human experts, with no help from AI tools. This reliance on human knowledge and dependence on large-scale experimentations result in prohibitive development cost and high failure rate. Recent developments in machine learning algorithms for molecular modeling aim to transform this field. In my talk, I will present state-of-the-art approaches for property prediction and de-novo molecular generation, describing their use in drug design. In addition, I will highlight unsolved algorithmic questions in this field, including confidence estimation, pretraining, and deficiencies in learned molecular representations.
Bio:
Regina Barzilay is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in natural language processing. Currently, Prof. Barzilay is focused on bringing the power of machine learning to oncology. In collaboration with physicians and her students, she is devising deep learning models that utilize imaging, free text, and structured data to identify trends that affect early diagnosis, treatment, and disease prevention. Prof. Barzilay is poised to play a leading role in creating new models that advance the capacity of computers to harness the power of human language data.
Regina Barzilay is a recipient of various awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, NSF Career Award, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship and several Best Paper Awards in top NLP conferences. In 2017, she received a MacArthur fellowship, an ACL fellowship and an AAAI fellowship. Most recently, in 2020, she is the first recipient of the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity.
Prof. Barzilay received her MS and BS from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University, and spent a year as a postdoc at Cornell University