Research Focus

​The Signal Processing and Computational Biology Group is an inter-disciplinary theoretical and computational research group in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). We focus on the development of high dimensional (Big Data) statistical signal processing and machine learning methods, and their diverse applications including communication, robust estimation, computational biology, and financial engineering. Our group is also focused on the theory and applications of random matrices.

News

July 2019

A pre-print of Saqib's work entitled "Resolving genetic linkage reveals patterns of selection in HIV-1 evolution" has been posted on bioArXiv. This is joint work with Ray Louie (UNSW) and John Barton (University of California, Riverside). 
Congrats to Faraz and Ahmed for their paper "Sub-dominant principal components inform new vaccine targets for HIV Gag" being accepted for publication in Bioinformatics.  This was joint work with David Morales (Queens University Belfast).

June 2019

Our paper "Asymptotics of eigenstructure of sample correlation matrices for high-dimensional spiked models" has been accepted for publication in Statistica Sinica.  This is joint work with David Morales (Queens University Belfast), Iain Johnstone and Jeha Yang (Stanford).
A pre-print of Laureano's work entitled "Extreme eigenvalue distributions of Jacobi ensembles: New exact representations, asymptotics and finite size corrections" has been posted on ArXiv. This is joint work with David Morales (Queens University Belfast). 

May 2019

Congrats to Ahmed for his paper "Identifying immunologically-vulnerable regions of the HCV E2 glycoprotein and broadly neutralizing antibodies that target them" that has appeared in Nature Communications.  This is joint work with Ray Louie (UNSW).

January - March 2019

Our group's research was highlighted in:

November 2018 

An article related to our group's research, titled "Fighting disease with data and hope", is published in The Standard ​newspaper.

September 2018

Matthew was invited to present an "IdeasLab" talk on the use of Big Data Methods to Guide Rational Vaccine Design at the World Economic Forum.  Here is the YouTube link.

Matthew was also selected as a Young Scientist of the World Economic Forum.

August 2018

Liusha Yang successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis. Congratulations to Dr. Yang!

June 2018

We bid farewell to Raymond Louie who had been with our group for five years. He was a core  member of our group's work related to computational biology. We wish Raymond the best of luck as he moves to the medical school at UNSW, Australia. 

June 10, 2018

Neel Kanth Kundu has joined our group as a Ph.D. student.  He comes to us from IIT-Delhi, and is a recipient of the prestigious Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship.   Welcome Neel Kanth!

June 6, 2018

Talk at 2018 Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare Summit, The Ritz Carlton, International Commerce Center, Hong Kong
Title: Inferring the fitness landscape of HIV by unsupervised learning
Speaker: Raymond Louie

May 2018

Talk at 2018 Hospital Authority Convention, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, Hong Kong
Title: Using data science to find weak spots of Hepatitis C virus: Implications for rational vaccine design
Speaker: Matthew R. McKay

February 2018

Our recent paper, published in PNAS, has received considerable media attention in Hong Kong.  Here are some examples (complete list on News page):
Local, mainland China, and general media
Science channels

January 2018

Matthew is now Area Editor (Feature Articles) of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.  

Videos of HKUST

Useful Links

-- Banner photo taken by HKUST alumnus Terence Pang