Just heading back from a conference, just one word to describe: amazing.
CSBio, a scientific conference specialized in information technology (Artificial Intelligence mostly) and computational biology, has successfully ended. The conference was held at Sheraton hotel in Nha Trang city. To be completely honest, this one truly blew me up. I have been attending several types of scientific conferences but CSBio was totally at another level. Also, this is my first time taking part in such a charming conference, which was served by professionally trained organizers from the very beginning to the very end.
The conference program was divided into two major sessions: the first one majors in artificial intelligence-related achievements such as image and video processing, natural language processing, prediction in the stock market, et cetera. This session amazed me the most since it showed how powerful Vietnamese IT scientists have been, coupled with their fantastic papers. I have to say for the IT area, VN is in no way inferior to developed nations. The other session could be depicted as the integration of artificial intelligence into biology, which is quite small in program duration compared to the first one. Still, it was really amazing because the achievements in this session were the evidence exhibiting that deep learning in particular and information technology in general could be alternated to apply in any of scientific fields, thereby facilitating the limit of scientific research. Interestingly, it also brings unexplanatory answers — black box — to the science as well.
The first opening CSBio talk is regarding the application of deep learning in food recognition. Friendly speaking, we give a picture of a meal to the computer, then it processes the image using convolutional neural network, a network of computational neurons specifically designed for image recognition, to predict every single ingredient along with the estimated nutrient content in the meal. Although the publication is not without limitation, but cheesus I could not imagine how they was able to come up with such an extraordinary idea and more overwhelmed by the approaches they made the project possible. They opened up the architecture of the neural network, modified the components in a desirable way to obtain high forecasting accuracy. It seems like opening a machine, makes a few changes to see what’s going on but trust me, IT-IS-EXTRATERRESTRIALLY-COMPLICATED.
The talk was then followed by other fascinating topics such as drug repositioning or drug repurposing, our publication on machine learning for drug discovery, In silico structure-based virtual screening, and the weirdest one: using word2vec, a natural language processing model, to extract disease-related genes from PubMed paper. It was a little pitty that I could not get this presentation well since the Japanese speaker’s voice was quite difficult to listen but it was still a wonderful project.
In addition to the conference program, I was filled with …a tremendous number of delicacies from coffee breaks, a fancy lunch and a more fancy dinner at Champa Island resort. Cheesus, how on earth could it be so full and mind-blowing at the same time T__T
And finally, I would like to express my special thanks to my professor, Dr. Ly Le for giving me such a wonderful opportunity to learn. This trip was not only catching my interest but also opening up my eyes how small and tiny I was compared to the scientific community out there. It looked like I was a lamb in the middle of the pride of lions. Also, I learned quite numerous things, both academically and non-academically from the trip. I cannot express enough my feeling, I just feel so grateful. Once again, thank you for everything.
