Machine Learning, Data Topology, Biomedical Datasets - Krishnaswamy Lab at Yale School of Medicine
June 29, 2026About the speakers
Information
- ID
- 14325
- To Cite
- DCA Citation Guide
Transcript
- 00:04Let's say we take a
- 00:05drop of your blood that
- 00:07has, you know, thousands and
- 00:08thousands
- 00:09of cells.
- 00:10If you think about visualizing
- 00:11the cells, they actually exist
- 00:13in some kind of a
- 00:14hundred dimensional space. Right? But
- 00:16they don't take up all
- 00:17this space.
- 00:18So they take up narrow
- 00:20niches within this high dimensional
- 00:22space. It forms a low
- 00:23dimensional manifold. You can think
- 00:25of a two d piece
- 00:26of paper in three d
- 00:27space. It's forming a lower
- 00:29dimensional manifold, and it solves
- 00:31a lot of the challenges
- 00:32in single cell data if
- 00:33you tried to explicitly model
- 00:34that lower dimensional shape or
- 00:35manifold that the cells reside
- 00:37in.
- 00:41My lab focuses on developing
- 00:43novel machine learning, deep learning,
- 00:46and general AI techniques
- 00:48that are a lot of
- 00:49times either motivated by or
- 00:52specifically designed for,
- 00:54analysis and insight from biomedical
- 00:56data, from sequencing machines, from
- 00:59imaging,
- 01:00from other kinds of specialized
- 01:03technology that can measure things
- 01:05like brain activity, cellular activity.
- 01:07So there's been a lot
- 01:08of this kind of data
- 01:09generated in biology that
- 01:11needs to be analyzed that
- 01:13could give us new insights
- 01:14that can accelerate discovery.
- 01:19We develop
- 01:20a class of methods that
- 01:22we call sort of geometric
- 01:24topological
- 01:26deep learning methods. These are
- 01:28kinda like your normal neural
- 01:29networks that are used to
- 01:30build anything else, but we
- 01:32infuse them with a lot
- 01:33of very specific specific kinds
- 01:34of
- 01:35math that's very important in
- 01:37biology. So geometry is something
- 01:39that we use a lot.
- 01:40Geometry happens to be really
- 01:41important in all parts of
- 01:42biology, including
- 01:43shapes of molecules.
- 01:46A molecule has a certain
- 01:47kind of geometry, and if
- 01:48it didn't have that, it
- 01:50couldn't bind to another molecule
- 01:52or perform its proper function.
- 01:54And then topology is a
- 01:56way of numerically characterizing
- 01:59different geometries.
- 02:00We also
- 02:01infused a lot of them
- 02:03with dynamic systems capabilities. So
- 02:05these will be neural networks
- 02:06that can implicitly learn a
- 02:08dynamic system that can generate
- 02:09things like trajectories
- 02:11and forecast what happens to
- 02:13cells and molecules, for example.
- 02:15So these kind of,
- 02:18mathematically enriched neural networks are
- 02:20able to learn more scientifically
- 02:22precise information than the ones
- 02:24that are used out in
- 02:25social media or in other
- 02:27parts of the world.
- 02:31Some prominent areas where we
- 02:33have active grants with a
- 02:34lot of collaborators are cancer,
- 02:36including breast cancer and colorectal
- 02:38cancer,
- 02:39immunology,
- 02:41where we're developing large models
- 02:43that predict immunogenicity,
- 02:46neuroscience,
- 02:47where we're looking both at
- 02:49stem cell development into different
- 02:51neuronal lineages as well as
- 02:53the more neural activity work.
- 02:55Yale is actually unusually well
- 02:57suited for this because you
- 02:59can be at the intersection
- 03:00of all these fields very
- 03:01easily at Yale. So I
- 03:02really love, you know, math
- 03:03and computer science and these
- 03:05kinds of things, and I
- 03:06really wanted to,
- 03:08impact
- 03:08a scientific discovery, biology, medicine,
- 03:11these kinds of things.