If you access Twitter through a smartphone, then chances are that you use online social platforms quite differently from those who use web browsers and desktop clients to login to their accounts. This is the general finding advanced in a paper by Mathieu Perreault and Derek Ruths that was recently accepted to the International Conference [...]
Workshop teaches street fighting with Python
This past Thursday Mathieu Perreault and Derek held a Python workshop entitled Street Fighting with ...
McGill Python Workshop #1: Why Python is Awesome
On Wednesday March 23rd, our lab hosted the first in a series of workshops introducing and exploring the power and ease of the Python programming language. Organized by Professor Derek Ruths and Mathieu Perreault, the workshop attracted more than 80 attendees, most of them students from McGill University. The purpose of this first Python workshop [...]
TEDxMcGill: Spoons, Cancer, and Civilization
This past Saturday, I had the amazing opportunity to speak at TEDxMcGill 2010. Much like the now-famous TED talks, this event was organized around an afternoon of 10-18 minute talks delving into “ideas worth spreading.” In my talk, I discussed what spoons, cancer cells, Ancient Roman roads, and online social networks all share in common: [...]
Brushing up on artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence, despite being a field of research unto itself, provides many powerful techniques that can solve problems across the computing sciences. This fall we’re reading through one of the best known textbooks on the topic: Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig’s “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.”
Fellowship funds interpretation of gene knockouts
One way of figuring out what something does is by taking it away. Pull the leg off of a table and you’ll find out that it was providing support. Biologists do this to cells to figure out how genes work: remove a gene and see what happens to the cell. If it dies, for example, [...]
Lab receives funding to predict the behavior of cells
Figuring out how a cancer cell is going to respond to a specific drug can require a year of research in the laboratory. We’re trying to cut this time down from a year to a day. The idea is to build models of cells in the computer that can then be exposed to compounds virtually. [...]
New tool makes measuring faculty performance easier
Within academia, a researcher’s citations record can sway faculty hiring decisions, grant awards, and departmental performance reviews. As a result, correctly computing these citation records is important. Often a simple search for an individual’s name on Google scholar is used in place of a more careful assessment. The result can be a very inaccurate citation [...]
Our research in under 3 minutes
Three minutes flies by pretty quickly – particularly when you’re trying to capture the essence of your research in that amount of time. This is exactly the format used by Soup and Science, an event here at McGill where professors have exactly three minutes to give an overview of their research to a group of [...]
How networks shape an economy
When businesses interact – whether through mergers, partnerships, acquisitions, or law suits – they change the competitive landscape within a market, alter how goods and services are provided, and redistribute economic and financial power and risk. As a result, when businesses interact, they change the economy. As financial booms and busts have demonstrated, changes in [...]
Models from semi-quantitative data
Transcriptional networks – webs of interactions among genes and gene products in an organism’s genome – regulate a wide array of cellular behaviors including cell growth, death, and movement. For this reason, biologists seek a better understanding of them in the hope of being able to repair transcriptional networks (TNs) involved in disease, characterize the [...]
