Academic Seminar: Research and Application of AI in drug discovery and biosciences
Our AIDD Centre at our faculty, as Macao's first AI drug discovery education base, constantly stays updated with cutting-edge technologies. We make efforts to deepen collaboration and exchange with leading research institutions worldwide to promote the research development of our centre members. On the morning of November 7, 2023, Professor Tong Hoi Yee from our faculty invited two assistant professors from the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Coimbra, Portugal: Joel P. Arrais and Professor Nuno Lourenço, to deliver a lecture at our faculty. The acting dean of our faculty and all the faculty and students of the AIDD Centre attended the exchange meeting.
Professor Joel P. Arrais shared some representative articles published by his team in the field of drug discovery using deep learning techniques. He primarily introduced reinforcement learning strategies, self-attention mechanisms, and their applications in molecular generation models and protein-protein interaction prediction models. He further explained the accelerated ability of deep learning technologies in drug discovery by examining the expression on A2A adenosine receptors and ubiquitin-specific protease 7.
Professor Nuno Lourenço shared his team's contributions in combining natural science knowledge with artificial intelligence techniques, using evolutionary computing methods to improve people's lives in engineering, chemistry, healthcare, and the life sciences. He mainly discussed their work in predicting blood glucose levels in diabetes patients using predictive models and in-depth analysis of hearing issues using evolutionary algorithms for hearing screenings, focusing on practical scientific problem-solving.
The presentations from both professors covered some of the current research highlights in artificial intelligence technology in drug discovery and the field of life sciences, providing a novel perspective on research observations. The students showed great interest in the research work presented, and the atmosphere during the exchange with the professors was enthusiastic. Through this exchange and learning opportunity, the students gained valuable insights, and the sparks generated during this exchange will serve as a new source of inspiration for their future learning and research endeavors.
Prof. Joel Arrais is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, since 2012. He has received his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from University of Aveiro in 2004 and 2010 respectively. His research interests are on developing algorithms to model biological problems. He is particularly interested in using pattern recognition and machine learning methods. On the recent past, Prof. Arrais has been involved on several studies that focused on the analysis and knowledge extraction from gene-expression data.
Nuno Lourenço is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra. His main research interests are in the areas Bio-Inspired Algorithms, Optimisation, and Machine Learning, especially Evolutionary Computation. He served as chair in the main conferences of the Evolutionary Computation field (EuroGP 2020 and 2021). He has authored or co-authored more than 60 articles in journals and top conferences from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Intelligence areas, and he has been involved as a researcher in 13 projects (national and international).
