Decoding Crop Genetics With Artificial Intelligence - AI Summary

Shiu is a professor in the College of Natural Science's Department of Plant Biology and in Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, a department jointly administered by the College of Natural Science and the College of Engineering. The researchers believe that AI can provide the assistance researchers need to crack those tough cases, which represent a sizable fraction of plant genes. To "teach" the AI, the team will program in available data, describing what scientists do know about plant genes and their functions. That's why the team also recruited machine learning ace Yuying Xie, assistant professor in the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, and expert experimentalist Melissa Lehti-Shiu, a research assistant professor in the Department of Plant Biology. In reaching its scientific goals -- using machine learning to predict gene functions -- the team is also aiming to demonstrate the power of AI as a research tool to the plant science community.