Learning to Discover Drugs

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Event Calendar Category

ORC

Speaker Name

Regina Barzilay

Affiliation

MIT CSAIL

Building and Room number

E51-335

Rapid developments in machine learning have completely transformed multiple areas of science and engineering. While today penetration of this technology into the pharmaceutical industry and medicine is still limited, the situation is rapidly changing. In this talk, I will describe ML algorithms that we have successfully implemented in the pharmaceutical industry including models for predicting biochemical properties, forward synthesis and molecular optimization.  This is a joint work with Wengong Jin, Kyle Swanson, Kevin Young, Connor Coley, Tommi Jaakkola and Klavs Jensen.

Regina Barzilay is a Delta Electronics professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in natural language processing, applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology. She is a recipient of various awards including the NSF Career Award, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship and several Best Paper Awards at NAACL and ACL. In 2017, she received a MacArthur fellowship, an ACL fellowship and an AAAI fellowship. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, and spent a year as a postdoc at Cornell University.