2016 Marker Lecturer

The free public lectures, sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science, include a lecture intended for a general audience, titled "Movie reconstruction from Brain Signals: 'Mind-Reading'" at 5:00 p.m. on Monday, April 25, in the Berg Auditorium, 100 Huck Life Sciences Building on the Penn State University Park Campus. The series also includes a lecture intended for scientists at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 26, titled "Unveiling the Mysteries in Spatial Gene Expression.” For the event on Tuesday, Yu will speak in the University Conference Center on the Penn State Hershey Campus, and simultaneously her lecture will be teleconferenced to 108 Wartik Laboratory on the Penn State University Park Campus.  



Yu's research group is engaged with scientists doing interdisciplinary research in genomics, neuroscience, and remote sensing. Her interests focus on statistics and machine learning theory, methodologies, and algorithms for solving high-dimensional data problems. During the April 25 lecture for a general audience, Yu will describe a breakthrough at the intersection of neuroscience and statistics, in which a statistical method, Penalized Least Squares, was used to construct a “mind-reading” algorithm that reconstructs movies from brain signals obtained via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This achievement led to the development of the system that was selected as one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Inventions of 2011. Yu's April 26 lecture intended for scientists will explore how gene networks contribute to the development of normal and abnormal tissues in an organism, including how these networks must vary in different locations in an organism to give rise to different types of tissue. In her technical talk on April 26, Yu will discuss a new method of extracting meaningful information from spatial gene-expression data (staNMF). The resulting representation of spatial patterns can be used for prediction and categorizing gene-expression patterns. Yu will demonstrate the use of the method to analyze the results of experiments in fruit flies, in which the gene networks have been altered using the new crispr/cas9 technology.

 

Yu is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2006, and was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) in 2013-2014. She is a fellow of IMS, the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She has served on or is serving on many journal editorial boards including those of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, Annals of Statistics, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. She has served on the scientific advisory board of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA and the board of trustees of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics at Brown University.