Upcoming Talks

Find details about the next talks and what’s coming up.
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  • AI for genomics: Accurate proteome-wide missense variant effect prediction with AlphaMissense

    June 26, 2025

    12:00 (Montreal Time)

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    Clare Bycroft

    Deepmind

    Dr. Clare Bycroft is a research scientist at Google DeepMind with a background in statistical and human genetics. She has a particular focus on ensuring the utility of AI models for variant effect prediction in real-world settings. Previously, Clare worked with a biotech (Genomics PLC) using human genetics data to propose new therapeutic targets, and during her DPhil (Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics) curated the first tranche of the UK Biobank genotyping data set, now routinely used by many thousands of researchers world-wide.

    Abstract: Machine learning approaches are proving a valuable aid in variant interpretation by exploiting complex patterns in large-scale biological data. I will discuss Google DeepMind's AlphaMissense, a deep learning model which combines advances of the highly-accurate structure prediction model, AlphaFold, and population variant data to predict missense variant pathogenicity. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on clinically-ascertained labels and experimental benchmarks, without explicitly training on such data. Using the example of AlphaMissese, I will cover our approach to model evaluation, interpretation, and assessing the utility of such a model in real-world contexts. Finally, I will discuss ways in which AlphaMissense has been used in genomic research since its publication.

Past Talks

Look back at previous talks and speakers, thanks again to all of you !

  • Genome modeling and design across all domains of life

    June 5, 2025

    Brian Hie

    Stanford University

  • Alphafold 2 and 3 - Methodological Overview and Drug Discovery Applications

    April 24, 2025

    James Kirkpatrick

    Isomorphic Labs

  • The real roadblocks in drug development is more than just chemistry

    March 20, 2025

    Nardin Nakhla

    Simmunome Inc

  • ML-based phenotyping for genomic discovery

    March 6, 2025

    Cory McLean

    Google Research

  • ML-powered 'lab-in-the-loop' approach for therapeutic antibody discovery and optimization

    February 27, 2025

    Vladimir Gligorijevic

    Genentech - Member of the Roche Group

  • Artificial Intelligence for Life in Space

    February 14, 2025

    Lauren Sanders

    NASA

  • A Mila BioAI-rg X Multi-omics-rg talk: Foundation model research across biological data modalities like DNA, RNA and protein

    January 31, 2025

    Thomas Pierrot

    InstaDeep

  • Speaking the Structure: Generative Models in Molecular Science

    December 6, 2024

    Yunhui Jang

    POSTECH, South Korea

  • From Health AI to Table Foundation Models; and back?

    December 5, 2024

    Gaël Varoquaux

    Inria (French computer science national research)

  • AI in the RNA Era: Bridging Fundamental Biology and Therapeutic Discovery

    September 26, 2024

    Giulia Cantini

    Helmholtz Munich

  • Geometric and Topological Machine Learning for Drug Discovery and Pattern Formation

    August 8, 2024

    Dhananjay Bhaskar

    Yale School of Medicine

  • Reinforcement Learning for Tissue-Specific Synthetic Promoter Generation

    June 27, 2024

    Luca Scimeca

    Mila

  • Biologically Explainable Dynamical Systems Underlying Gene Regulation in Cancer

    April 4, 2024

    Intekhab Hossain

    Harvard University

  • Applications of Machine Learning for Gene Networks

    March 18, 2024

    Victoria Mochulska

    McGill University

  • Efficiently Detecting Interactions and Matching Across Modalities in High Dimensional 'Omics Data

    February 21, 2024

    Jason Hartford

    Valence Labs at Recursion Pharmaceutical

  • ProteinShake: Building Datasets and Benchmarks for Deep Learning on Protein Structures

    February 14, 2024

    Carlos Oliver

    Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Germany

  • Phantom oscillations in principal component analysis

    January 25, 2024

    Matthew Scicluna

    Université de Montréal

  • Learning from prepandemic data to forecast viral escape

    November 30, 2023

    David Hamelin

    Université de Montréal

  • DynGFN: Towards Bayesian Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks with GFlowNets

    November 16, 2023

    Joseph Viviano

    Mila

  • HyenaDNA

    November 2, 2023

    Alexis Nolin Lapalme

    Université de Montréal

  • Causal Experimental Design

    June 22, 2023

    Stefan Bauer

    Technical University of Munich

  • Monitoring Cancer Patients Using Liquid Biopsy and High-Multiplex qPCR

    May 31, 2023

    Zeev Russak

    Infiniplex

  • Machine Learning enabled Pooled Optical Screening in Human Lung Cancer Cells

    December 14, 2022

    Srinivasan Sivanandan

    Insitro

  • Causal inference with instrumental variables

    November 16, 2022

    Jason Hartford

    Mila

  • Fast and Accurate Bayesian Polygenic Risk Modeling with Variational Inference

    November 2, 2022

    Shadi Zabad

    McGill University

  • T cell atlas: receptor sharing vs age, sex and disease

    June 29, 2022

    Assya Trofimov

    University of Washington

  • The HLA-dependent impact of emerging sars-cov-2 lineages on cellular immunity and antigenic drift

    June 15, 2022

    David Hamelin

    Université de Montréal

  • Guided Generative Protein Design using Regularized Transformers

    June 1, 2022

    Egbert Castro

    Yale University

  • Single-cell simulation and cell state control

    May 18, 2022

    Ionelia Buzatu

    Mila

  • Opening up the brain: An overview of an end-to-end open science neuroimaging research project

    April 6, 2022

    Colleen Gillon

    University of Toronto

  • The Liver Microenvironment in Health and Disease

    March 9, 2022

    Tallulah Andrews

    University of Western Ontario

  • Cellular Phenotyping using Deep Learning

    February 23, 2022

    Oren Krauss

    Recursion Pharmaceuticals

  • Neighbour Embeddings of scRNA-seq Data

    January 26, 2022

    Dmitry Kobak

    University of Tübingen

  • Morphogenesis as Collective Intelligence: from basal cognition to general AI

    January 12, 2022

    Michael Levin

    Tufts University

  • Density estimation and comparison on single-cell graphs

    November 11, 2021

    Alex Tong

    Mila

  • What challenges do we face when designing recommendation systems to guide laboratory experiments?

    October 27, 2021

    Paul Bertin

    Mila

  • LSTM based context-dependent model of sequence evolution

    September 29, 2021

    Dongjoon Lim

    McGill University

  • TorchDrug

    September 16, 2021

    Zhaocheng Zhu, Chence Shi and Zuobai Zhang

    Mila

  • Transport problems in biology: theoretical and applied insights

    June 16, 2021

    Adit Radhakrishnan, Louis Cammarata

    Broad Institute

  • Saliency is a Possible Red Herring When Diagnosing Poor Generalization

    June 2, 2021

    Joseph Viviano

    Mila

  • Geometry-based data exploration

    April 21, 2021

    Guy Wolf

    Mila

  • CRISPR genome editing tutorial

    April 7, 2021

    Natasha Dudek

    Mila

  • Protein function prediction is improved by creating synthetic feature samples with generative adversarial networks

    November 26, 2020

    Cen Wan

    Birkbeck, University of London

  • A machine learning Automated Recommendation Tool for synthetic biology

    November 12, 2020

    Hector Garcia Martin

    Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

  • Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences

    October 29, 2020

    Alexander Rives

    Facebook

  • Gene2vec: distributed representation of genes based on co-expression

    October 15, 2020

    Degui Zhi

    University of Texas, Houston

  • UDSMProt: universal deep sequence models for protein classification

    October 1, 2020

    Nils Strodthoff

    Heinrich Hertz Institute

  • Gaussian-Dirichlet Random Fields for Inference over High Dimensional Categorical Observations

    September 17, 2020

    John San Soucie

    MIT-WHOI

  • Supervised learning on phylogenetically distributed data

    August 18, 2020

    Elliot Layne

    McGill

  • Generative models for graph-based protein design

    August 4, 2020

    Zichao Yan

    McGill

  • Genomic Language Models

    July 21, 2020

    Matthew Scicluna

    Université de Montréal

  • Predicting reservoir hosts and arthropod vectors from evolutionary signatures in RNA virus genomes

    July 7, 2020

    Natasha Dudek

    McGill