Ming Li's Home Page

Ming Li
Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics
Professor, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1
Email: mli at uwaterloo dot ca
Phone: 519-888-4659, Fax: 519-885-1208

Home | Complete CV | Bioinformatics papers | Other papers
Research interests:
Bioinformatics, Kolmogorov complexity and its applications, computational learning theory, computational complexity, and design and analysis of algorithms.
Popular writings:

Scientific American, June, 2003, pp. 76-81, "Chain letters and evolutionary histories" by Charles H. Bennett, Ming Li, Bin Ma. See here for all the chain letters in our study. Scientific American cover
"De genen van de kettingbrief" by Martijn van Calmthout, De Volkskrant, Wetenschapsbijlage/5W, Saturday 21 June 2003.
Neue Zurcher Zeitung. June 25, 2003.
New Scientist, November 6, 1999, pp. 44-47, "On a Roll" by Dana Mackenzie on our work in Kolmogorov complexity; You can download the article for free at this site. See here for more comments on this.
Die Zeit , April 13, 2000 (#16), p. 40: "Geometrisch Eingekreist" by Wolfgang Blum.
Courrier International, December 23, 1999 -- January 5, 2000 (#41), p. 477-478: "Le h asard ne joue pas aux de's", par Dana Mackenzie (translation NS article).
SUN's feature st ory on our PatternHunter software, Sept., 2001. This java.sun.com website is accessed by 2 million viewers per day.
Nature, Science Up date, Jan. 29, 2002 and Wired News story "Digging Deep Into Compression", Feb. 6, 2002 You can find some related and our work in popular writing on new methods to construct evolutionary trees, and compression.
Some Recent Lectures:

The 13th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference COCOON'07, July 16-19, 2007, Banff, Alberta.
11th Int'l Conf. Develop. Language Theory DLT 2007, Turku, Finland, July 3-6, 2007.
3rd International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, ISBRA 2007, Atlanta, May 7-10, 2007.
Ohio Collaborative Conference on Bioinformatics, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, July 9-11, 2007.
Distinguished Lecture series, School of Computing, Simon Fraser University, Oct. 26, 2006.
The Third Annual RECOMB Satellite Workshop on Regulatory Genomics, Singapore, July 17-18, 2006.
31st Int'l Symp. Math. Found. Computer Science (MFCS'06), Bratislava, Slovakia, Aug. 28 - Sept. 1, 2006,
IEEE Int'l Conf. on Granular Computing (GrC'06), Atlanta, May 10-12, 2006.
11th Int'l Conf. on Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA'06), Taipei, Taiwan, Aug. 21-23, 2006.
Information Beyond Shannon, Orlando, Oct. 27-28, 2005.
The 16th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) 2005, Jeju Island, Korea, June 19-22, 2005.
SIG Struture, Singapore, Jan. 17, 2005.
The Third International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians, Hong Kong, Dec. 17-22, 2004.
Distinguished Seminar series, School of Computing, Queen's University, Nov. 12, 2004.
The 4th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Brighton, UK, Nov. 2-4, 2004.
Workshop on Foundations of Data Mining, Brighton, UK, Nov. 1, 2004.
The 3rd Annual Toronto Undergraduate Biotechnology Symposium, Toronto, March 26, 2004.
2003 Bioinformatics In Taiwan (BIT2003) Symposium, Taiwan, Sept 5-7, 2003.
2002 Australian Joint Artificial Intelligence Conference, Canberra, Australia, Dec. 2-6, 2002.
Computational Challenges In The Post-Genomic Age-II, "PatternHunter: Any Genome Anywhere". March 11-13, Durham, North Carolina.
Bioinformatics: new challenges to computer science. Beijing Bioinformatics Conference (Keynote Speaker). Nov. 27, 2000, Beijing, China. (Organized by Academia Sinica and Beijing Genomics Institute.)
Whole genome phylogeny, Case Western Reserve-Netgenics-Athersys mini-symposium on computational genetics, Cleveland, Oct. 20, 2000.
Shared information: genomes, documents, and programs. Bioinformatics Workshop, Wayne State University, Detroit, Oct. 26, 2000.
Bioinformatics: new challenges to computer science. ICS Conference. 3 hour tutorial. Taiwan, Dec. 5, 2000.
The Waterloo Bioinformatics Group:

Please visit our group homepage Bioinformatics group at Waterloo to see our people, publications, software, and bioinformatics resources. Here are some photos of our 2006 Christmas party. We have a dynamic research group in bioinformatics. We are recruiting brilliant students and post-docs with strong algorithm, programming, and molecular biology backgrounds. If you are strong in at least two of these fields (and have some knowledge in the third) and you are a dedicated worker, please send me an email.
Professional activities:

General Chair of APBC'2005
Co Managing Editor Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Associate Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Computer Science and Technology
Associate Editor for Journal of Computer and System Sciences
Editor for SIAM Journal on Computing
Editor for Information and Computation, 1997--2006
Editor for Journal of Combinatorial Optimization
Editor for International Journal of Theoretical Computer Science 2000-2003.
Some International Conference Program Committees/Review Penals: GIW2007 , Singapore, December 3--5, 2007; WABI2007 , Sept 8-9, 2007; CPM 2007 July 9-11, 2007, London, Ontario, Canada; KDD 2007 Aug 12-15, 2007, California; SODA2007, New Orleans, Jan. 2007; CPM2006, Barcelona, Spain, July 5-7, 2006; CITO; NSF; CPM2004, Istanbul, Turkey, July 5-7, 2004; APBC2004, Dunedin, New Zealand, Jan. 18-22, 2004; CSB2003,2004, Stanford, CA, August, 16-20, 2004; STOC'01, Crete, Greece, July 6-8, 20 01; FOCS'99, New York City, NY, October 17--20, 1999; ISAAC98 Korea, Dec. 1998; FST&TCS'99, Chennai, India, Dec. 13-15, 1999; LATIN00, Uruguay, April 10-14, 2000.
Awards:

Fellow: Royal Society of Canada, ACM, IEEE.
E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, 1996
Award of Merit, Federation of Chinese Canadian Professionals, 1997
Killam Fellowship, Killam Foundation, 2001.
Pioneer Award, 2006, IEEE-GrC, 2006.
Teaching:

CS798 2007, Fall Term Kolmogorov complexity and applications. DC 3313, Mondays 4:30-7:00pm.
2007, Jan. 9, 11: Two Lectures presented in Shai Ben-David course. Lecture 1 and Lecture 2. Assignment (1 hour): Consider an iid English text of length 100. At each position, each letter from a to z appears independently with probability 1/26. Compute the probability of aaa and abc occuring in this text, respectively. (Hint: you can do dynamic programming as in class, you can also just do simulation to find the probabilities of aaa and abc.) You can hand in this little assignment to my mailbox in the CS main office area, by Jan. 25th. Large Project: if you are interested in doing larger projects related to bioinformatics, please email me.
CS882 2006, Fall Term Protein Folding.
CS860 2005, Spring Term Introduction to Kolmogorov complexity and applications.
CS882 2004, Winter Term Advanced Topics in Bioinformatics: Algorithms and Software.
CS360 1999 Fall Term Theory of Computation.
CS340 1996 Winter Term Data Structure.
1995 CS340 Winter Term: Model Solutions to Final Exam and Marks for the course Data Structure.
Programming with Java, 1997 Winter Term. This page contains my lecture notes (powerpoint files), and best applets made by the students in this class.

Recreational interests:

Hiking, Weiqi, reading, swimming, table tennis. John Tromp was my Weiqi teacher.
Maintained by Ming Li, August 30, 2007.