Models, Inference & Algorithms (MIA)

Please email mia-team@broadinstitute.org with a line of introduction to receive our weekly emails, including all relevant details for upcoming talks.

Details for MIA meetings in fall 2021 to come.

The Models, Inference & Algorithms (MIA) Initiative at the Broad Institute supports learning and collaboration across the interface of biology and medicine with mathematics, statistics, machine learning, and computer science. Our weekly meeting features a primer, breakfast, seminar, and discussion; these are open and pedagogical, emphasizing lucid exposition of computational ideas over rapid-fire communication of results. Other MIA functions include hosting workshops, developing educational resources, advising leadership, and supporting the computational community.

Current co-chairs: Alex Bloemendal (since fall 2015), Aleksandrina Goeva (since Jan 2021)

MIA's efforts are driven by the Steering Committee: Mehrtash Babadi, Brian Cleary, Sam Friedman, Gopal Sarma (co-chair, Jul 2019 - Jan 2021), Anika Gupta, Ray Jones, James McFarland, Mollie Morg, Mor Nitzan, Max Shen, Emma Stickgold, and Elizabeth Wood.

Jon Bloom and Alex Bloemendal founded MIA in Fall 2015. Jon Bloom served as a co-chair through July 2019. Past Steering Committe members: Allen Goodman, Debora Marks, David Benjamin, Dylan Kotliar, Jon Bloom, Hilary Finucane, Sam Riesenfeld, Yakir Reshef, and Aviad Tsherniak.

MIA Overview: Watch this introduction to the past, present, and future of MIA, and how you can help drive the fusion of machine learning and biomedicine. Check out the Kendall Square Codebreakers in the Harvard Crimson.

MIA Playlist: Watch and share our growing library of MIA videos.

Talking Machines: Listen to interviews with Eric Lander, Aviv Regev, and Nick Patterson.

Spring 2021 Schedule: 10am Primer, 11am Seminar unless noted otherwise, all via Zoom. Please refer to our MIAcast (weekly email announcement) for Zoom meeting information. Email morg@broadinstitute.org with questions and mia-team@broadinstitute.org to be added to our mailing list.

Date	Speaker	Title
Jan 27	Michael Desai Depts. Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Physics, Harvard University	Primer: Genomic investigations of evolutionary dynamics and epistasis in microbial evolution experiments [Video]
Jan 27	Gautam Reddy NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biology; Harvard University	Predictable patterns in phenotypic evolution [Video]
Feb 3		No primer
Feb 3	Christina Leslie Computational & Systems Biology Program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center	The 3D genome and predictive models of gene regulation
Feb 10		No primer
Feb 10	Martin Jankowiak Pyro Team, Broad Institute	Bayesian methods for adaptive experimental design [Video]
Feb 17		NO MEETING THIS WEEK
Feb 24	Michael Mitzenmacher Dept. Computer Science, Harvard University	Primer: Locality sensitive hashing: A sort of history and introduction [Video]
Feb 24	Hayden Metsky Sabeti Lab, Broad Institute	Viral diagnostic design with model-based optimization [Video]
Mar 3	Emily Laubscher Van Valen Lab, California Institute of Technology	Primer: Integrating heterogeneous measurements in single cells [Video]
Mar 3	David Van Valen Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology	Single-cell biology in a software 2.0 world [Video]
Mar 10	James Hay Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School of Public Health	Primer: Using viral loads and within-host models to improve COVID-19 surveillance [Video]
Mar 10	David Hong Dept. of Statistics, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania	Simple, flexible and effective pooled testing via hypergraph factorization [Video]
Mar 17		NO MEETING THIS WEEK
Mar 24	Jung-Eun (June) Shin Marks Lab, Harvard Medical School	Primer: Generative models of antibodies for functionally optimized library design [Video]
Mar 24	Mafalda Dias Marks Lab, Harvard Medical School Jonathan Frazer Marks Lab, Harvard Medical School	Large-scale clinical interpretation of genetic variants using evolutionary data and deep learning [Video]
Mar 31	Hoon Cho Broad Institute	Primer: Density-aware visualization and sketching of single-cell transcriptomic data [Video]
Mar 31	Leland McInnes Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing	Low dimensional embeddings of words and documents (and how they might apply to single-cell data) [Video]
Apr 7		No primer
Apr 7	Ronen Mukamel Loh Lab, Harvard Medical School; Division of Genetics, Brigham and Women's Hospital; Broad Institute	Imputed repeat polymorphisms point to protein-coding variants driving genetic associations [Video]
Apr 14		NO MEETING THIS WEEK
Apr 21		NO MEETING THIS WEEK
Apr 28		NO MEETING THIS WEEK
Apr 29		No primer
Apr 29	Sara Mostafavi Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington	Deep learning of immune differentiation (Note: 12pm start) [Video]
May 5	Alan Amin Marks Lab, Harvard Medical School	Primer: Estimation and testing with generative nonparametric Bayesian models [Video]
May 5	Eli Weinstein Marks Lab, Harvard Medical School	Building and evaluating generative models of biological sequences, from proteins to whole genomes [Video]
May 12	Michelle Li Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics Program, Zitnik Lab, Harvard Medical School	Primer: Deep learning for biomedical networks: Methods, challenges, and frontiers [Video]
May 12	Marinka Zitnik Dept. of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard University; Broad Institute	Actionable machine learning for drug discovery and development [Video]
May 19		NO MEETING THIS WEEK
May 26		NO MEETING THIS WEEK
Jun 2	Marina Riabiz King's College London	Primer: Optimal thinning of mcmc output with application to cardiac electrophysiology [Video]
Jun 2	Lester Mackey Depts. of Statistics and Computer Science, Stanford University; Microsoft Research New England	Probabilistic inference and learning with Stein’s method [Video]