The Department of Electrical and Chemical Engineering presents its seminar series featuring guest speaker Can Chen, assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Data Science and Society, who will give a presentation on “Hyperlink Prediction in Biological Networks.” This seminar will take place on Friday, November 21, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. over Zoom.

Abstract

Various biological networks, such as metabolic reactions, drug interactions, and gene pathways, exhibit intricate higher-order interactions. However, these networks are often incomplete and poorly characterized due to limitations in current knowledge and technology. Traditional graph representations, which primarily capture pairwise relationships, fall short of capturing the full complexity of these interactions. Hyperlink prediction provides a powerful framework for uncovering missing higher-order interactions by modeling these networks as hypergraphs, a generalization of graphs where hyperlinks can connect multiple nodes simultaneously. In this talk, I will discuss recent advancements in hyperlink prediction and its applications to genome-scale metabolic networks, drug synergies, and gene pathways in bacteria.

Biography

Can Chen is an assistant professor in the School of Data Science and Society at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a secondary appointments in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Biostatistics. He earned his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of California, Irvine, in 2016, followed by an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Ph.D. in Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 2020 and 2021, respectively. From 2021 to 2023, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His research interests encompass control theory, network science, machine learning, and computational biology.