StringMasters Weave Words in Perth
The Centre for Combinatorics on Words and Applications (CCWA) recently held a four day StringMasters workshop which attracted researchers from across Europe, Asia and North America to Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.
For those who might not be aware of this field, Combinatorics on Words and its sister area, String Algorithms, are central to the work of Bioinformatics. The Centre was established in late 2014 to encourage collaboration and progress the work in this highly specialised discipline.
Topics covered during the StringMasters meeting included:
- Multiple order preserving matching by Kunsoo Park of Seoul National University;
- Bit-parallel sequence alignment algorithms by Gary Benson of Boston University;
- Genome sequencing and superbubbles by Ljiljana Brankovic of The University of Newcastle;
- Circular sequence comparison with q-grams by Fatima Vayani of King’s College London;
- Runs, Lyndon words, and Lyndon trees by Hideo Bannai of Kyushu University; and
- An elementary O(n log n) algorithm for computing runs by Bill Smyth of McMaster University/King’s College London.
Outcomes from the meeting will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Discrete Algorithms. CCWA will soon be implementing an Open Problems page to list and update a collection of problems submitted by its members.
