Bill Qian

Hi, I am an undergraduate student at Rice University, and I will be continuing at Rice as a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science.

I am part of the Human-Centered AI and Robotics Lab led by Prof. Vaibhav Unhelkar. My research interest lies in utilizing multimodal information (i.e. language and images) to help autonomous agents learn to perform tasks and better collaborate with humans.

Previously, I worked on characterizing the pathogenicity of short nucleotide sequences with machine learning at Treangen Lab.

news

Jun 20, 2022	My co-authored paper “SeqScreen: accurate and sensitive functional screening of pathogenic sequences via ensemble learning” just got published (under the name Zhiqin Qian)!

selected publications

Genome Biology

SeqScreen: accurate and sensitive functional screening of pathogenic sequences via ensemble learning

Balaji, A., Kille, B., Kappell, A. and 11 more authors

Genome Biology Jun 2022

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The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the importance of accurate detection of known and emerging pathogens. However, robust characterization of pathogenic sequences remains an open challenge. To address this need we developed SeqScreen, which accurately characterizes short nucleotide sequences using taxonomic and functional labels and a customized set of curated Functions of Sequences of Concern (FunSoCs) specific to microbial pathogenesis. We show our ensemble machine learning model can label protein-coding sequences with FunSoCs with high recall and precision. SeqScreen is a step towards a novel paradigm of functionally informed synthetic DNA screening and pathogen characterization, available for download at www.gitlab.com/treangenlab/seqscreen.