Teaching

• Our team is the one teaching the available bioinformatics and computational courses at KAUST and the associated techniques from Machine Learning and AI to that end.
• The only courses in bioinformatics, computational biology, and network biology offered at KAUST as of now are the two courses (B322 and B390N) listed below. We hope to offer additional courses in the future pending faculty recruitment in this area.
• In the new program in Bioengineering – there is a track on Bioinformatics and Machine Learning where B322 and B390N can be selected.
• We also coordinate a hands-on workshop (august) on coding and scripting with special reference to bioinformatics targeting mainly individuals with a bio-background.

1. Designed during 2017 a new course “Computational Bioscience and Machine Learning” targeting master and PhD students from primarily BESE and CEMSE. The course is given for the third time during the spring of 2020. This course sets a common ground for the students arriving from different areas and specialized courses could readily be developed following up this course.

    

   Syllabili Spring 2020 Course Number B322

    

2. Designed a new course during 2018/19 in Machine Learning for Genomics and Health to be given in the spring of 2020 for the first time. Targeting master and PhD students with coding abilities, from the three divisions. Machine learning techniques are making strong inroads in medicine and life-sciences w.r.t. both molecular data, clinical drug responses, and medical imaging. Several high-end papers in Nature, Science, and Cell has been published over the last 3 years where both data (!!) and code are available (github). The course will be very hands-on, reading and implementing code, working with published data in these papers, redo the analysis, and results from selected recent key papers. Outstanding students will have an opportunity to perform additional research in their projects to potentially improve published results or methods.

    

   Syllabili Spring 2020 Course Number B390N

    

3. In the new proposed Bioengineering Program (planned to start fall 2019) there will be four tracks for the master students. Professor Jesper Tegner will chair - together with Prof. Xin Gao - the Track Bioinformatics and Machine Learning. Here they will accept students primarily with an engineering/quantitative background/aptitude.

   Teaching: The foundational mandatory part for all four tracks Professor Tegner teaches Data Analytics and Computation with Prof. Xin Gao (fall semester)

    

4. Professor Tegner coordinates – together with profs Aranda and Krattinger -  the formation of postdoc lead program for an annual practical workshop on coding tools for bioinformatics. This will be given prior to the beginning of the teaching semester in August and focus is on working R and Python tools and scripts for bioinformatics analysis of biological data.

    

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5. Then Professor Tegner does invite lectures/tutorials at summer schools, meetings etc. Latest one a Summer School on Integrative Bioinformatics, one week, Spain (Sept 2018)

These are some examples of useful courses – in relation to our research – that are offered at KAUST.

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• B 204 Genomics (fall)
• B241 Molecular & Cellular Biology (spring)
• B320 Stem Cells and Molecular Medicine (spring)
• CS 220 Data Analytics (fall)
• CS 229 Machine Learning (spring)
• CS 340 Computational Methods in Data Mining (fall)
• CS 390DD Special Topic: Deep Learning for Visual Computing (spring)
• STAT 210 Applied Statistics and Data Analysis (fall)
• STAT 290B: Special Topic: Applied Statistics with R (fall)
• AMCS 143 Introduction to Probability & Statistics (fall)
• AMCS 241 Stochastic Processes (fall/spring)
• AMCS 251 Numerical Linear Algebra (fall)