College of Engineering | Computer Science and Engineering

Guowei Wei and Yiying Tong awarded an NSF grant

Guowei Wei, Professor of Mathematics, and Yiying Tong, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, have been awarded an NSF grant ($1,184,362) titled "De Rham-Hodge theory modeling and learning of biomolecular data ".

 

The objective of the present project is to develop novel de Rham-Hodge theory-based approaches to revolutionize the current practice in biomolecular data analysis and modeling. The de Rham-Hodge theory is a hallmark of the 20th Century’s mathematics that has had a great impact in modern mathematics, quantum physics, and computer science. The investigators will introduce for the first time the de Rham-Hodge theory to reduce the structural complexity of biomolecules. Additionally, the research team will propose persistent de Rham-Hodge theory and element-specific de Rham-Hodge theory for the first time to properly encode chemical and biological information in biomolecular data representation. These methods will be carefully integrated with advanced machine learning or deep learning algorithms to reveal biomolecular structure-function relationships. Moreover, the investigators will extensively validate the proposed methods on a variety of datasets, such as protein binding to the protein, ligand, DNA and RNA, protein folding stability changes upon mutation, drug toxicity, solvation, solubility, and partition coefficient. Finally, user-friendly software packages and online servers will be developed using parallel and GPU architectures for researchers who are not formally trained in advanced mathematics or sophisticated machine learning.

 

(Date Posted: 2019-08-20)