Dan Brown
Professor
Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Canada
Biography
Dr. Dan Brown is a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
Research Interest
Professor Brown's primary research area is the understanding of sequential data, joining ideas from evolutionary theory with probabilistic modeling and discrete mathematical ideas. His established expertise is in biological sequence analysis, where he has worked on a host of areas, ranging from homology search to algorithms for hidden Markov models to haplotype inference and kinship discovery. A recent notable effort has been in design of algorithms for large-scale evolutionary tree reconstruction, with PhD student Jakub Truszkowski; their work resulted in the algorithms QTree and LSHTree, which are among the fastest known in this domain that still have good accuracy guarantees. QTree uses quartet queries and a clever data structure to predict phylogenies in O (n log n) time for n species, while LSHTree is the first phylogeny algorithm with subquadratic runtime with accuracy guarantees for sequences from a Markov model.
Publications
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D.G. Brown, J. Truszkowski. Fast phylogenetic tree reconstruction using locality-sensitive hashing. Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics, pp 14-29.
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A. Singhi and D.G. Brown. On cultural, textual and experiential aspects of music mood. To appear in Proceedings of the 2014 International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.
