A paper, titled “Graphical approach to week motif recognition” co-authored by Mr.
Yang Xiao, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computer Engineering and Assoc.
Prof. Jagath C. Rajapakse was among the three papers nominated for the best
paper award at the Fifteenth International Conference on Genomic Informatics
(GIW2004), Yokohama, Japan in Dec, 2004. When the motifs in the genomic
sequences are weak, the classical approaches fail to recognize them as motifs.
The paper proposed a novel graph-based approach which is capable of detecting
weak motifs, i.e., when the number of degenerate positions are large compared
to the length of the motif. The GIW is one of the prestigious and oldest
conferences in the fields of genomics and bioinformatics.