COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS

Dr. Dua’s research specialization is Data Mining, Computational Decision Support, Structural Bioinformatics Biological System Modeling, Multi-modality Fusion, and Biomedical Imaging. Dr. Dua’s laboratory designs and implements high-performance algorithms and software “Cybertools” for data mining and computerized learning. These algorithmic tools discover, classify, and exploit trends, patterns, and anomalies in large volumes of data. The laboratory also develops unsupervised and supervised algorithmic routines for sequential, temporal, and associative pattern discovery in spatiotemporal spaces. These algorithmic routines have applications in gene expression and protein sequence/structure datasets based analytics (supported by NIH). Recent efforts have focused on extracting and isolating protein structural features that sustain invariance in evolutionary-related proteins through the integrated and localized analysis of hydrophobicity and other physicochemical properties. Dr. Dua’s team is currently investigating such methods to computationally characterize biological resistance to freezing, desiccation, and radiation, to improve technologies for the detection and sampling of microorganisms under conditions similar to those found on the surface of Mars. Other applications of such data-mining methods include automated detection, identification, and tracking of patterns of (hostile) “targets” using multi-sensor satellite imagery and network data (for the U.S. Air Force).