Natural Selection, Inc.^® Presents Two Articles Pertaining to Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Computation at the WCCI 2002 Conference

Honolulu, HI-- Dr. Gary B. Fogel, senior staff scientist of Natural Selection, Inc.^® , presented a co-authored paper titled "Evolved Neural Networks for Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships of Anti-HIV Compounds” at the 2002 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI). The paper was co-authored by Dana Landavazo, staff scientist, and compares the utility of an evolved neural network to a linear model to describe the activity of a set of anti-HIV compounds published in the literature. The results indicated that significant nonlinearity exists within the descriptors for these molecules. This nonlinearity can be captured in a neural network architecture for significantly increased predictive performance.

A second article, co-authored by Rene Thomsen (presenter) and Dr. Thiemo Krink of the EVALife Group at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and Dr. Fogel was titled “A Clustal Alignment Improver Using Evolutionary Algorithms.” This work extended previous research with evolutionary algorithms by using multiple sequence alignment solutions obtained from the well-known Clustal V algorithm as candidate solutions for the initial evolutionary population. The results clearly indicated that evolutionary algorithms can improve the results of Clustal V significantly, with marginal computational effort. To obtain a copy of these publications, please email Dr. Gary Fogel at gfogel [at] natural-selection.com.

Natural Selection, Inc.^® was founded in 1993 to address complex problems in industry, medicine, and defense. The company possesses unique expertise in computational intelligence techniques, including evolutionary computation, neural networks, and fuzzy logic. The corporation's research efforts support the discovery of new pharmaceuticals, the automated detection and diagnosis of breast cancer from film-screen mammograms, optical character recognition, and a variety of military and industrial projects.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. David B. Fogel,
Chief Executive Officer,
Natural Selection, Inc.,
3333 N. Torrey Pines Ct.,
Suite 200,
La Jolla, CA, 92037
tel: (858) 455-6449
fax: (858) 455-1560
dfogel [at] natural-selection.com