Faculty Profiles

Debra Calliss

Trevor Cohen

James Collofello

Partha Dasgupta

Dijiang Huang

Bill Lewis

Faye Navabi

Aviral Shrivastava

Guoliang Xue

Jieping Ye

faculty profiles

Jieping Ye

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Jieping Ye

Our genes determine much about the direction of our health and our lives. Yet, isolating which genes control which biological function is no easy feat. We have yet to learn the function of most of the 30,000 genes that comprise every human body.

Jieping Ye’s research, in machine learning and its applications, is the first stage in understanding gene interactions and functions. Ye, along with four SCI graduate students and Dr. Sudhir Kumar from the School of Life Sciences, is using machine learning techniques to study the embryo development of
fruit flies.

Machine learning has become popular in recent years because it has been efficiently used in many fields, including biology. For Ye and his colleagues, machine learning is what will ultimately help them understand the function of genes. They analyze the embryonic images of fruit flies they retrieve to try to find genes that share similar expression patterns. “If two genes share a similar expression pattern, it is likely that they perform similar functions,” Ye said.

Once the function of certain genes is learned, researchers can begin to understand the roles such genes play in the development process. Ultimately, such knowledge will allow scientists to discover the origin of potential health problems. Although this is not the current focus of Ye and his fellow researchers, he points out, “If we know which genes control a certain type of disease, we may find a better way to treat it by focusing specifically on those genes.”

Ye joined ASU in the fall of 2005 after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He won the outstanding student paper at the International Conference on Machine Learning in 2004. He was also awarded the Guidant Fellowship for the most outstanding Ph.D. student at the Computer Science and Engineering Department during his last year at the University of Minnesota.