Recent Pomona Grad wins National Research Competition in CS

Shiri's poster and presentation were titled "An evaluation of the edit-distance-with-moves similarity metric for comparing genetic sequences". She started this research during a summer research experience program at DIMACS (advised by Dr. Graham Cormode), and then continued during the school year at Pomona advised by Pomona College Assistant Professor Tzu-Yi Chen. She is currently working for Sharpcast in Palo Alto, CA.

Competitors in the contest produced posters describing their research that were judged by a panel of computer scientists. The five semi-finalists in each of the undergraduate and graduate categories were then invited to give a presentation at the conference on their research, with the winner chosen based on the quality and significance of their research, on the informal discussion of posters, and on the formal presentation of their research.

Shiri's research focussed on finding efficient and accurate ways to measure the similarity of two strings. Within the context of computational biology, the strings are genetic sequences, and the similarity of different strings may reveal information about both the evolutionary history of the organisms and the functionality of the sequences. Shiri coded the first known implementation of an approximation algorithm developed by Cormode and Muthukrishnan for a similarity metric known as the edit-distance-with-moves. She then demonstrated through extensive testing that this is a promising alternative to other techniques currently in use.