----------------------------------------------------------------------- BIOINFORMATICS COLLOQUIUM School of Computational Sciences George Mason University ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Applications of Genetic Algorithms in Bioinformatics John Grefenstette GMU Tuesday, March 2, 2004 4:30 pm Verizon Auditorium, Prince William Campus Genetic algorithms are heuristic search and optimization methods that employ ideas inspired by biological evolution, including survival of the fittest, mutation and recombination. Genetic algorithms have been applied to a wide variety of problems in bioinformatics, including multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic reconstruction, feature selection and multidimensional scaling. After a brief tutorial and survey of applications, this talk will describe some recent work extending the genetic algorithms approach to the problem of identifying multiple distinct solutions in multimodal search spaces. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Refreshments are served at 4:00 pm. Find the schedule and directions at http://www.binf.gmu.edu/colloq.html