Sarker's Lab of Omics Mining and Algorithmic Reasoning L'OMAR

Linguistically, OMAR in L’OMAR is a Bengali word meaning Immortal. While achieving immortality is definitely not the purpose, L’OMAR aims to bring health care innovations to help people live equal, longer and healthier.

The primary focus of L’OMAR is mining omics (aka multi-omics) data such as genomics (DNA), transcriptomics (RNA), proteomics (proteins), metabolomics (metabolites), metagenomics (microbiomes) etc. to understand human biology computationally. L’OMAR develops algorithmic reasoning techniques leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) emphasizing on explanations (XAI) to the predictions and decisions an AI-agent may bring in 1) understanding the biology of diseases, 2) identifying promising drug-targets and drug molecules, and 3) repurposing existing drugs for drawing faster response against future pandemic.

One particular niche area L’OMAR exploring is how to build models that are capable of integrating multi-omics data by using knowledge graphs, and building explainable AI-driven reasoning approaches to elucidate the hidden links and connections among biological entities that may help discover new biomedical knowledge and insights.