SOP
Uploaded by
Asad Bin Ala QatariSOP
Uploaded by
Asad Bin Ala QatariI am a computer scientist with focus on machine learning and algorithm design.
My exposure
to computational biology has kindled my interest in this newly emerging field. Having secured
admission into the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur with an all-India First rank
among 125,000 candidates, I have been preparing myself for a research career. I intend to do a
PhD in computer science at UW which will allow me to master various computational techniques
required in bioinformatics and provide an ideal beginning towards my long term goal of setting
up an independent research laboratory.
The chief motivation for my interest in the Computer Science department of UW-Madison is its
strong faculty specializing in computational biology. The department will offer me the valuable
opportunity to strengthen my computational skills and at the same time apply them in the ongoing
bioinformatics projects. I have personally contacted Dr. Thomas Anantharaman and Dr. Mark
Craven who have encouraged me to apply for this program. I am also interested in the projects of
Dr. David Page and Dr. Jude Shavlik who are doing research in machine learning and
bioinformatics, related to my previous projects. Besides these, the ongoing projects of Dr. Miron
Livny and Dr. Deborah Joseph are equally exciting and my research experience will be useful in
carrying out doctoral projects in their laboratories.
Short Internships at Dr. R. Sowdhaminis laboratory at National Centre for Biological Sciences,
Bangalore have given me the opportunity of carrying out front-end research in computational
biology. I have done projects on interacting motif identification in protein superfamilies, protein
fold recognition and family annotation based on substrate specific motifs in proteins. The results
have been exciting and we are under the process of analyzing results and preparing manuscripts.
My summer internship project at Lund University (Sweden) with Prof. Anders Irback on the
Monte Carlo simulations of coupled protein folding-binding has been accepted for publication in
the peer reviewed Journal of Chemical Physics. My B. Tech Project, under the guidance of Prof.
Somenath Biswas, is aimed towards developing protein fold-recognition algorithms using pattern
detection in Fourier domain and the graph theoretic Contact-Map approach. I have also carried
out a project with Prof. Harish Karnick on distinguishing proteins from random sequences using
Artificial Neural Networks.
Under the guidance of Prof. Manindra Agarwal, I developed an algorithm for the strategy-game
Chinese Checkers using a modified game tree approach. Systematic testing of the algorithm
was carried out in various types of board situations which are difficult even for a human player. It
was declared the Best Project for winning the knockout tournament among 20 similar
implementations in the class. While carrying out a project on developing a two-layer Email spam
filter using Bayesian learning and perceptrons, under the guidance of Prof. Harish Karnick, I got
a chance to experiment with the effectiveness of different machine learning techniques in
practical situations. With Prof. Amitabha Mukherjee, I worked on developing a face recognition
system using Active Appearance Models. The extensive literature survey associated with the
project allowed me to learn the various techniques used in the field of Artificial Intelligence and
Computer Vision.
I consider myself as a deserving candidate for the program given my strong multidisciplinary
academic background at IIT and research experience in bioinformatics. A number of elective
courses in Physics, Mathematics and Biosciences have been instrumental in strengthening my
fundamentals for computational biology research. With my credentials and a strong commitment
for outstanding research in doctoral projects, I hope to add unique value to the class of incoming
graduates.
