Application for 2007 Majid Kazemian

Department of Computer Science

University of Illinois

Statement of purpose
Herein, I am going to outline my academic, extra-curricular accomplishments, my career
objectives and the motivation to pursue the graduate program in computer science at the
University of Illinois.

Academic and Professional Background

In my M.Sc. studies, I benefited from the courses of the best university in my country as well
as extensive research at intelligent processing center established there that gave me a
comprehensive exposure to the core areas of Artificial Intelligence, especially an understanding
of the algorithms inspired by natural systems (biocomputing) and their application to natural
systems (bioinformatics).

My paper presentations and publications further highlight my interest in the interdisciplinary

fields of biocomputing and bioinformatics under the joint concept of hybrid intelligent systems.
I believe that these two fields have too many interesting problems to investigate and they can
co-evolve in many directions, while progress in one field can change the other.

In my M.Sc. thesis, I decided to concentrate on bioinformatics, one of my areas of interest.

Therefore, I actively participated in an international training course on bioinformatics to explore
some of major problems so that the organizer called me biologist. I found out that
bioinformatics suffers from the variety and diversity of huge information sources available. I
developed a classifier combination system, and extended it based on expertness measures and
applied it to the protein secondary structure prediction – an instance of the problem - using
information fusion techniques, including conventional (e.g. ordered weighted averaging,
Dempster-Shafer) and intelligent (e.g. fuzzy integral, neural network) ones. In this research,
each classifier stood for an agent with its own expertness. A meta-classifier architecture was
proposed in the decision level regarding each agent expertness region. The application of this
architecture significantly improved the results while highlighted some biological interesting
hidden facts. In addition, data fusion was developed as a design pattern and implemented as a
Matlab/Simulink toolbox for efficient modeling and simulation of generic data fusion systems.
The proposed architecture, mined biological trends, implementation results and developed
toolbox separately presented in conference and journal papers.

During my M.Sc., I also hold an interest in biocomputing, my other area of interest, and have
some published papers. I extended the swarm-clustering concept inspiring by the pollination
behavior of bees to develop a new data clustering algorithm which does not need any parameter
setting. I would also like to continue mimicking the natural phenomena to solve more
engineering problems.

While independent working helped me to specialize on a sub-field of bioinformatics, team

working, a really enjoyable relationship, broaden my knowledge to other disciplines such as
web environment, med-informatics, robot path planning, memetic algorithms and reinforcement
learning where I have some contributions and technical reports.

Being a teaching assistant of my co-advisor in an international university, besides achieving a

good research experience, it provided me with a good teaching experience which has led me to
teach courses like Data Structures and Object Oriented Programming. In my opinion, teaching is
a part of research, because a researcher should find a way to communicate his discovery to
others.

Having a good research background, including several journal and conference publications,
excellent ranked master dissertation (highest grade evaluated by five professors) as well as a
Application for 2007 Majid Kazemian
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois

good GPA, it opened me an opportunity of pursuing a PhD without an entrance exam in any
university of my home country. I was also ranked as a first level researcher by our ministry of
science, in order to benefit from facilities with respect to elites.

During the B.Sc. studies, I received one of the best undergraduate educations in hardware
engineering that gave me a good systemic view as well as mathematical background. I achieved
the second position among all my classmates. I started my research by developing an interest in
the areas of image processing and fuzzy systems. Persian handwritten digit recognition was the
problem to which I could apply both image processing and fuzzy techniques. I continued my
work on image processing besides hardware interface design in my final project. The project
was entitled "Moving object tracking using steering camera" and got the best grade.

As I believe that no where one can find the real work experience than in the real world and
society, I have not neglected working outside the university during my academic studies. In the
first two years of my studying in computer, I served as a programmer in a company with focus
on accounting systems. I learned many facets of large-scale system design, which recently led
me to take the "Advance topics in system design" course in order to improve my knowledge
about new design methodologies such as agile design. After a short period, I became a manager
and designer of a subsystem. I also developed some office management programs for my
university as well as administrating department network. After my B.Sc., I further changed my
focus to research - the objective of my future career - and became a computer science consultant
and leader of some research projects in a Bioinformatics institute in my home country.

Future Plan

Information fusion has been widely investigated in a variety of fields such as decision-support
and expert systems. It can improve reliability in decision making and learning process in multi-
agent environment under uncertainty conditions while utilizing less costly information. The
application of information fusion is currently seen in some subfields of bioinformatics where
there is a large amount of information available from multiple heterogeneous sources with
different accuracy. Therefore, by combining data sources intelligently, we are able to obtain a
more complete and comprehensive picture of the problem.

Classifier fusion systems, or in general meta-predictors, could play a considerable role in all
functional genomics problems, from gene to protein structure and function studies as well as
microarray data. Making use of the vast amount of data produced by genome sequencing
projects to describe genome function is very important. Besides this, the development and
analysis of information fusion techniques using game theory, learning and hybrid intelligent
approaches will lead to better results. I would like to develop machine learning techniques in
bioinformatics.

I came to find out extremely distinguished collaborative groups from different departments
involved in extensive research in the area of Artificial Intelligence, biocomputing and
bioinformatics at your university, so I am confident that the offered program will be an
invaluable opportunity for me to extend my academic pursuits, broaden my horizons, and go
towards my objectives to reach my full potential as a scientist. I would like to work with Dr.
Saurabh Sinha since my research interests are very close to his research area.

It would, therefore, be a privilege to pursue graduate studies with adequate financial

assistance at your university. Given my background, I believe that I will match the high
standards set by your university.