March 12, 2025
The Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications hosted invited speaker Prof Artemis Hatzigeorgiou for a talk titled Function analysis of miRNA’s and machine learning, a long lasting friendship on Wednesday 19 March 2025 at 12.00pm EEST.
The talk took place physically at the Lecture Room of the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications, while participation was also possible via zoom.
Watch the full video, here:
About the talk: microRNAs (miRNAs) are central post-transcriptional gene expression regulators in healthy and diseased states. In the context of cancer, significant dysregulation of miRNA transcription and expression has been observed from early stages, highlighting the oncogenic or tumor suppressor roles of numerous miRNAs. Despite decades of effort, deciphering miRNA targets remains challenging, leading to an incomplete miRNA interactome and partially elucidated miRNA functions. During the talk, machine learning algorithms and databases developed for the characterization and function analysis of miRNA function will be presented. Next to a convolutional neural network (CNN) model for miRNA target prediction, a CNN model for the characterization of Transcription Start Sites of miRNAs will be introduced. The performance of both models strongly outperforms existing implementations shedding light on previously unexplored facets of the miRNA interactome.
Short Bio: Artemis Hatzigeorgiou has been a Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Thessaly since 2012 and an adjunct Professor at the Hellenic Pasteur Institute since 2015. From 2001 to 2007, she was an assistant Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Genetics at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, and from 2007 to 2012, a Researcher at the BCRS Al. Fleming in Vari, Athens. She studied Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart and obtained her PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Jena. She is the head of the DIANA (DNA Intelligent Analysis) lab, which focuses on biological sequence analysis and gene regulation. The group, with extensive expertise in developing machine learning algorithms for the characterization of noncoding RNA genes, was initially established at the University of Pennsylvania and then successfully relocated to Greece. The tools and databases provided range from microRNA target identification to pathway analysis and tools for the identification of diagnostic and therapeutic markers. They can be found at www.microrna.gr, a computational gene analysis platform visited by more than 70,000 unique researchers worldwide each year. She has published in top-tier journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, and PNAS. Her work has been cited more than 27,000 times (h-index 59) according to Google Scholar, and she has been listed among the 1% of the most cited scientists in her field for two consecutive years according to the Clarivate Analytics database, Web of Science (“The Highly Cited Researchers List”). Artemis Hatzigeorgiou is a recipient of the “Young Investigator Career Award” from the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the USA and served as the president of the Hellenic Society of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from 2016 to 2022.