Seminar: Similarity of Weighted Tree Structures and Applications

Dr. Virendrakumar C. Bhavsar (University of New Brunswick)

Wednesday, June 11, 2014, 10:30AM, EV3.309

Abstract

The notion of similarity (or matching) has played a very important role from the beginnings ofartificial intelligence. The matching process, depending on the application, may involve keyword matching (e.g. Google), schema matching, taxonomic similarity and ontology matching, or other types of similarities. Clustering forms one of the basic computations in many Big Data applications and it is based on the concept of similarity (or distance).

We have developed novel weighted tree similarity algorithms applicable to many domains, e.g. bioinformatics, e-Business, e-Health, e-Learning and semantic web. We have also carried out high performance implementations of these algorithms on cluster and graphics processing units (GPUs). This talk will present an overview of the algorithms and their applications.

Bio

Virendrakumar C. Bhavsar received the B.Eng. (Electronics and Telecommunications) from University of Poona, India, and the M.Tech. (Electrical Eng.) and Ph.D. (Electrical Eng.) degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Dr. Bhavsar was a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, 1974-83. Since 1983 he has been at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, where he is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science. He was the Dean of the Faculty during 2003-08. He is the founding Director of the Advanced Computational Research Laboratory that has been housing high performance computing systems since 2000. He co-led the bioinformatics component of the Canadian Potato Genomics project. He has been also involved in the Atlantic Computational Excellence Network (ACEnet) – about $30 million high performance computing initiative in Atlantic Canada

His current research interests include parallel and distributed processing, artificial intelligence applications in e-Business, e-Learning and bioinformatics, and the semantic web. He has authored over 150 research papers in journals and conference proceedings and has edited three volumes.