Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo
Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo is a Professor and Director of the Bioinformatics Lab at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). He is also a co-founder and Chief Scientist of My Intelligent Machines (MIMs). In Africa, he co-leads Acces Omic Senegal with the Institut de Recherche en Santé, Surveillance Épidémiologique et de Formation of Senegal. This initiative is building the foundation of precision in health in Senegal.
He was born in Romania where both his guinean parents were PhD candidates in mathematics. He received his primary education in Guinea.
He obtained a PhD in Computer Science (option bioinformatics) from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, in April 2009 supported by a Canadian Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Fellowship. During his PhD, his research focused on conceiving algorithms and bioinformatics method to better understand gene and genome evolution and molecular function. He received the Chikio Hayashi Award of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) in 2006 for his PhD research. He also received the Springer Award for the best presentation in classification at SFC-Cladag in 2008.
After his PhD, he went on to become a postdoctoral scholar in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was also Research Associate of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Currently, Abdoulaye’s research is at the intersection between bioinformatics, artificial intelligence and genomics. He is developing technologies that empower life scientists in the health and agrigenomics sectors to address important questions by providing algorithms and machine learning methods to detect, study and monitor pathogens in epidemiological surveillance, to include genomic precision in livestock production models, and to model and monitor biodiversity in agriculture and forestry. He also provides Artificial Intelligent-powered technologies to help deliver to life science communities an easy-to-use and integrated genomic informed solutions.
In addition to the awards listed above, Abdoulaye was awarded the early career UQÀM Science Professor Excellence Award in 2016. He received the best paper awards at the Machine Learning and DataMining Conference in 2016. His research is funded by the Discovery Grant of the Canadian Natural Science and Engeneering Research Council (NSERC), Quebec Research Fund in Nature and Technology, Genome Quebec, HIVTrust, and the NIH. He has more than 60 publications and more than 30 guest talks in prestigious institution such as MIT, Harvard, Oxford, UCSF, Institut Pasteur de Dakar and others. In 2018 he has been awarded the Next Einstein Forum fellowship
He is a member of the International Society of Computational Biology, Association Canadienne en Informatique, Africa Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. He is a member of the RQRM (Regroupement Quebecois de Recherche sur le Médicament) and an Associate Member of Compute Canada. He also founded of wwwAfrica, series of workshop to enhance the web driven technologies in Africa and BAI@IJCAI series of workshops leveraging bioinformatics and AI.