Title: A Gentle Introduction to Bioinformatics

Abstract:
Bio-informatics is an interdisciplinary field involving computer science and statistical methods to understand better molecular biology and the function of genes and their molecular interactions. The flow of information from the Human Genome Project and related world-wide efforts has revolutionized many fields of biosciences. The focus of bio-informatics is to deal with this flood of information, coming from academic, industry and government labs, and turning it into useful knowledge. Bio-informatics is used mainly to help solve problems that arise due to an enormous amount of data used for managing and analyzing biological data. 

Classification of biological data such as proteins has been analysed and tested using various techniques to classify genomes. These include Support Vector Machines,other kernel based methods and also Artificial Neural Networks. However, the classifiers produced by these methods do not give a satisfactory class description, as output. In this session, a basic introduction to DNA, proteins and Bioinformatics is given, and then the use of formal language descriptions to classify proteins, that take the form of expressions, grammars or automata,  is discussed.