Welcome to Machine Intelligence & Biocomputing (MIB) Laboratory!  We develop new intelligent learning methods and complex network models for biomedical knowledge discovery.

Research Interests

•     Evolutionary Computing

•     Interpretable Machine Learning

•     Explainable AI

•     Complex Networks

•     Bioinformatics

•     Computational Biology

News

• 2025-04: Ting  received  Queen's University AMS Undergraduate Mentorship Award! (Ting is deeply grateful to the students who nominated her for this meaningful recognition) 

• 2024-09: Congratulations to Ronny Rochwerg on successfully defending his MSc thesis titled "Building interpretable learning models with evolutionary algorithms"!

• 2024-09: Congratulations to Emily Medema on successfully defending her MSc thesis titled "Why would the Internet lie to me?: Analyzing the performance of misinformation on Twitter utilizing large language models, machine learning, and evolutionary computing"!

• 2023-12: Congratulations to Zhendong on successfully defending his PhD thesis titled "Genetic data analysis and interpretation via feature selection and network science"!

• 2023-06: Congratulations to Kyle on successfully defending his PhD thesis titled "A deep generative model framework for creating high quality synthetic transaction sequences"!! We are so proud of Kyle, our lab's first PhD!

• 2023-05: Ting is named a Champion of Mental Health. Thanks to our students for the nomination and thanks to Queen's Campus Wellness for the recognition!

• 2022-10: Congratulations to Chengyuan on graduating with his M.Sc. research on "Biomedical data mining with evolutionary computing"!

• 2022-10: Congratulations to Jinting on graduating with her M.Sc. research on "Quantitative analysis of genotype-to-phenotype mappings in evolutionary algorithms"!

• 2022-09: Welcome our new M.Sc. students, Emily Medema, Ronny Rochewerg, and Suruthy Sivanathan! Look forward to an exciting journey with you!

• 2022-07: Ting is promoted to Associate Professor with tenure (many thanks to my students who wrote support letters for me, to my graduate students for all the hard work, and to all my colleagues!)

• 2022-07: Ting was invited to chair the GP track of the 2023 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in Lisbon, Portugal

• 2022-06: Our undergraduate researchers, Awni Altabaa, David Huang, Ciaran Byles-Ho, Hani Khatib, and Fabian Sosa, have their paper on "geneDRAGNN: Gene Disease Prioritization using Graph Neural Networks" accepted for publication and won the Best Student Award at the 19th IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB). This was also the First-Prize winning paper of ProjectX. Read about this here!

• 2021-05: Congratulations to Shengkai on graduating with his MSc research on "Genome-wide association study of colorectal cancer using evolutionary computing"!

• 2021-04: Congratulations to Arshad on graduating with his MSc research on "Metamarker: Differential correlation network methodology and software for metabolomic data analysis"!

• 2020-12: Ting received the School of Computing's annual Howard Staveley Teaching Award! Thanks to our undergraduate students for the nomination!

• 2020-09: Welcome our new PhD student Ryan Zhou!

• 2020-08: Congratulations to our undergraduate student Chengyuan Sha on receiving Mitacs Research Training Award!

• 2020-05: Welcome undergraduate students Jake Robertson (NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award) and Jinting Zhang (Queen's School of Computing Undergraduate Research Fellowship) joining our research group this summer!

• 2019-12: Ting was interviewed by the School of Computing at Queen's as a new faculty member. Here is the interview video.

• 2019-10: Ting was invited to give a keynote speech at the Artificial Intelligence for Design conference hosted by NRC

• 2019-10: Congratulations to Yu on graduating with her MSc research on "PANDA: Prioritization of Autism-genes using network-based deep-learning approach"!

• 2019-09: Our MIB lab relocated to the School of Computing at Queen's University

• 2019-09: Congratulations to Songyuan on graduating with his MSc research on "Deep learning for genome-wide association studies and the impact of SNP locations"!

• 2019-07: Ting was selected to serve as a member of the Computer Science Evaluation Group, NSERC Discovery Grant

• 2019-07: Ting was interviewed by the VOCM radio station, program Open Line with Paddy Daly! Here is the interview clip

• 2019-06: Ting and our MIB research were featured in The Gazette!

• 2018-09: Welcome medical student Michael Lee to join our lab for research!

• 2018-06: Welcome Science Undergraduate Research Award (SURA) student Ling Xu to join our lab this summer!

• 2018-05: Congratulations to Mehrzad on graduating with his MSc research on "Investigation of vertex centralities in human gene-disease networks"!

• 2018-05: Welcome our new lab member Kyle Nickerson (MSc)!

• 2018-03: Our first Master's student Fara has graduated with his thesis research on "Ensemble learning for detecting gene-gene interactions in colorectal cancer"!

• 2018-01: Welcome our new lab member Shengkai Geng (MSc)!

• 2017-09: Welcome four new members to our lab, Asma (PhD), Zhendong (PhD), Arshad (MSc), and Yu(MSc)!

• 2016-11: Ting was selected for the Best Professor Award of the Department of Computer Science by the Computer Science Graduate Society (CSGS)

Available positions

We are recruiting M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. Applicants who are enthusiastic about our research are welcome to email Ting with your resume and research statement for an inquiry. Applicants who have an outstanding academic record and a research background in evolutionary computing, machine learning, and bioinformatics will be given a priority for consideration. In your inquiry email, please use the title [MIB lab research position inquiry]. 

We also always look forward to working with undergraduate students who would like to gain research experiences in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and biomedical computing. Please email Ting for potential research projects using the title [MIB lab undergraduate research project inquiry].