Wednesday, March 07, 2012
5:00 PM
Hutchison Hall Room 140(Hubbell Auditorium)
Professor Adrien Treuille
Carnegie Mellon University
G. Milton Wing Lectures : Interactive Biology
Nanoscale engineering holds the key to developing next-generation therapies, but this painstaking process depends on the difficult task of predicting molecular self-assembly. This talk describes two unprecedented "citizen science" projects to rapidly advance bioengineering. Our on-line protein folding game, Foldit, challenges non-experts to fold proteins, a puzzle akin to "3D Tetris." Our brand new nano-engineering game, EteRNA, pushes this concept into the rich and confounding world of real experimentation and validation: every week, we synthesize top EteRNA player designs and return this data as score back into the game. EteRNA thus enabling thousands of enthusiasts to stringently test scientific hypotheses on a weekly basis. Both games now hosts a thriving communities of citizen scientists who are outperforming existing state-of-the-art algorithmic methods.
Bio: Dr. Treuille, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2008,
is one of the country's leading young computer scientists. Currently on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University,
he holds an NSF CAREER Award, is a panelist for the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and in 2009 was named by MIT Technology Review as one of the Top Innovators Under 35.