METAxDATA: Cyril Labbé -  Seek & Blastn
Channel: QUEST Center BIH
Date: 23/10/2019

This lightning talk was delivered on October 15th 2019 at the BIH QUEST Center METAxDATA event. 
Film production by Maximilian Alexander, www.luma-frame.com

Cyril received a PhD  in computer science  and a MS in applied mathematics from University of Grenoble.  He is a tenured associate-professor in computer science since 2001 and at the head of the Information Systems research team (Sigma-team) at the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory, France. His  research interest include large scale data management  and text   analysis.  His work on text—mining and automatic detection of bogus scientific paper, has led to retractions or withdrawals of more than hundred of computer science and bio-medical publications. He is also the creator of Ike Antkare, a fictitious scientist, that had once (dixit Google Scholar) an astonishing h-index. In addition to authoring research publications he wrote the "scigen detection" and the "Seek & Blastn" softwares. For his work, he has been invited to many venues around the world and was honoured in the rank of Knight of the order of the french academic palms.

Seek & Blastn
Seek & Blastn is a semi-automated fact checking tool. It verifies the targeting or non-targeting status of published nucleotide sequence reagents. Seek & Blastn automatically extracts gene identifiers and nucleotide sequences (15 to 90 bases) using named entity recognition techniques (thesaurus and rules). The sentence containing each sequence is automatically analyzed (using finite-state machines) to assign a claimed status (targeting or nontargeting) that is compared with the most likely status according to a blastn analysis.