Title: Controllable Generative AI for Biological Sequences
Ewa Szczurek (Helmholtz Munich and University of Warsaw) and Jan Olszewski (University of Warsaw)
Registration form: Register here
Course summary:We present a course on diffusion-based generative modeling, covering both continuous and discrete formulations. The course introduces the fundamental principles behind diffusion processes and demonstrates practical methods for training these models and generating samples from them. We further explore techniques for controlling and biasing generation through guidance mechanisms, with an emphasis on applications in biological sequence design and optimization. Throughout the course, we ground the discussion in concrete examples while also providing a broader synthesis of current approaches and their roles within the field of generative modeling.
About the lecturers :Ewa Szczurek is an associate professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics at the University of Warsaw, Poland and serves as the director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, Germany. She leads joint labs at Helmholtz Munich and at the University of Warsaw. She was visiting associate professor at Northwestern University in the United States (2023) and a visiting fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, Germany (2016). She holds Master degrees in computer science from the University of Warsaw, Poland and Uppsala University, Sweden. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin (2011), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Switzerland at ETH Zurich. She received the distinction, scientific and didactic awards from the Rector of the University of Warsaw, as well as ETH Zurich, IMPRS fellowships for her postdoctoral and doctoral research, scientific excellence award from Perspektywy Foundation, and was distinguished as Forbes Woman to Watch 2026. Her work was supported by numerous grants, including ERC consolidator. She acts as area chair for NeurIPS and ICML, as well as associate editor for Genome Biology. She loves to work on AI models and is very excited about their applications in molecular biology and medicine.
Jan Olszewski is a PhD student at the University of Warsaw Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics, supervised by Anna Gambin and Ewa Szczurek. His research is conducted within the ERC-funded project Deep Optimized Generation of Antimicrobial Peptides. He holds degrees in mathematics and machine learning from the University of Warsaw and has collaborated with research groups at Helmholtz Munich, Jagiellonian University, and IDEAS NCBR. His interests lie at the intersection of mathematics and AI, with a particular focus on unifying modern machine learning ideas into elegant frameworks that address practical real-world problems.
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||