Boston Chapter of IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM
7:00 PM, Thursday, 25 September 2025
MIT Room 32-G449 (Kiva) and online via Zoom

This seminar was rescheduled due to speaker illness.

Learning, engineering, and targeting cell states in cancer
Ava Amini

Please register in advance for this seminar even if you plan to attend in person at
https://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Msf8F_LXTcSD2mWpDeVx5A

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Indicate on the registration form if you plan to attend in person. This will help us determine whether the room is close to reaching capacity. We plan to serve light refreshments (probably pizza) before the talk starting at around 6:30 pm. Letting us know you will come in person will help us determine how much pizza to order.

We may make some auxiliary material such as slides and access to the recording available after the seminar to people who have registered.

Abstract:
Cancer is often treated using a reductionist approach: distilled to an individual subtype, mutation, or phenotype. But fundamentally, cancers are complex ecosystems that necessitate systems-level understanding and intervention. Addressing this problem is equal parts biology and computer science. In Project Ex Vivo, a joint cancer research collaboration between Microsoft Research and the Broad Institute, we are envisioning a new, constructionist paradigm for precision oncology, one powered by the bottom-up integration of computation and experimentation to understand the complexity of cell state ecosystems in cancer. In this talk I will share our recent efforts to build AI models to better define, model, and therapeutically target cell states in cancer.