Abstract:
An old problem in the social sciences is to find a consensus given different opinions or preferences or votes. The social science methods developed over the years for dealing with this problem are beginning to find novel and important applications in information technology. This talk will briefly describe the use of such methods in meta-search (finding the results from multiple search engines), image processing, collaborative filtering, and software measurement and then concentrate on the application of such methods to the large databases of molecular biology. Specifically, we will discuss the problem of finding a single molecular sequence that is in some sense the consensus of a collection of molecular sequences obtained by different subjective or objective methods or different investigators.