Dr. Raymond Ng

Director, Data Science Institute, UBC; Chief Informatics Officer, PROOF Centre of Excellence

My bioinformatics research focuses on problem domains where intelligent decision support and knowledge discovery tools can assist in the understanding of genomic and biomedical data. Specifically, by applying data mining techniques, we link clinical and genomic data to assist cancer researchers in obtaining profiles for cancer in the gene expression level. The biological questions we focus on are: (a) whether there are subtypes of cancer detectable at the gene expression level; (b) whether cancer of one tissue type, say A, is closer to cancer of tissue type B, than to cancer of tissue type C; (c) whether, for a given tissue type, there are signature genes for cancer. Apart from cancer analysis, we develop infrastructure to facilitate cancer researchers for their analyses. One example is the gene expression analyzer we developed. The analyzer sits on top of a relational database management system, and provides both querying and data mining capabilities for gene expression data. See the affiliated web pages for more information.

With respect to my research interest on multimedia data management, my research focuses on providing database support for non-traditional visual-based data that may be in the form of still images or motion videos. For still images, our focus is on image querying and indexing. For motion videos, our focus is on the analysis of trajectories of objects extracted from the videos. Research of this kind is important to surveillance applications, sports and entertainment applications, etc. See the affiliated web pages for more information.