CSL Special Seminar: Tong Zhou - Structure Identification for Gene Regulatory Networks

Structure Identification for Gene Regulatory Networks

 Tong Zhou

Department of Automation
Tsinghua University
Beijing, P.R.China

Abstract: Cellular networks usually consist of numerous chemical species, such as DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules, etc. Different biological tasks are generally performed by complex interactions among these species. These interactions can rarely be directly measured, and it is widely believed that causal relationship identification is essential in understanding biological behaviors of a cellular network. Challenging issues here include not only the large number of interactions to be estimated, but also many restrictions on probing signals.

In this talk, we will discuss how to incorporate power law and robust state estimations into cellular network structure identification, with the purpose to increase accuracy of causal regulation estimations. The developed methods have been tested on an artificially constructed linear system, a Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase pathway model, some DREAM initiative in silico data and some in vivo data. Compared with the widely adopted methods, computation results show that parametric estimation accuracy can be significantly increased and false positive errors can be greatly reduced.

Bio: Tong Zhou was born in Hunan Province, China, in 1964. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, in 1984 and 1989, respectively, another M.S. degree from Kanazawa University, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, in 1991, and the Ph.D. degree from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1994. After visiting several universities in The Netherlands, Japan and China, he joined Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1999, where he is currently a Professor of control theory and control engineering. His current research interests include robust estimation and control, system identification, signal processing, hybrid systems, networked systems and their applications to real-world problems in molecular cell biology, spatio-temporal systems, magnetic levitation systems and communication systems. Dr. Zhou was a recipient of the First-Class Natural Science Prize in 2003 from the Ministry of Education, China, and a recipient of the National Outstanding Youth Foundation of China in 2006. He has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (continuously two terms, six years), and is now on the editorial board of Automatica (continuously four terms). He is an IEEE fellow.