Presenters: Ana Meštrović, Martina Ašenbrener Katić, Vedran Miletić, Patrizia Poščić

Title: Research of New Drugs and Social Aspects of a Pandemic Caused by Coronavirus Using ICT

Duration: 30 min.

Abstract: Presenters will present two research projects of the Department of Infromatics, University of Rijeka related to pandemic caused by Coronavirus. Communication through social media has been gaining importance in responses to major crises, such as COVID-19. Understanding and recognising the information spreading patterns plays an important role in alleviating fear uncertainty. The team at the Department of Informatics, University of Rijeka proposes a novel multilayer framework that defines a set of approaches, methods and network-based models by capturing three aspects of information spreading analysis: (i) content, (ii) context and (iii) dynamic. The available structures of viral proteins and RNA molecules are used to screen and design a new set of drugs using the commercial databases and molecular docking protocols. Their second project proposes a development of a new database containing all commercially available small-molecule ligands and a docking server with a web-based user interface able to source the compounds from the database for the high-throughput virtual screening. Their approach offers major advantages that can bypass the problems that have traditionally plagued the pharmaceutical industry.

Biography:

Patrizia Poščić is a Full Professor, a head of the Department of Informatics, University of Rijeka and a head of the Chair of information systems. Her main professional and research interests are in the fields of information systems, databases and data warehouses. She currently lectures several undergraduate and graduate courses in Computer Science. She has participated in several research projects.

Ana Meštrović is an associate professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Rijeka. She is head of Chair for Network Systems at Department of Informatics and a member of Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity, University of Rijeka. She is an author of more than 70 scientific papers related to the domain of natural language processing and complex networks. Currently, she is the project leader of the SemText project (Measuring Semantic Similarity of Texts), funded by the University of Rijeka. Her main research interests include complex networks analysis, knowledge representation, natural language processing and artificial intelligence in general.

Martina Ašenbrener Katić is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Rijeka. She has been teaching several courses in the area of information system development, data modelling and software engineering at the Department of Informatics, University of Rijeka. She has participated in several research projects. She has co-authored several papers.

Dr. Vedran Miletić works as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Rijeka, Department of Informatics. He is a member of the Committee for Supercomputer Resources at the University of Rijeka. Dr. Miletić completed his postdoc in the field of computational biochemistry at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Heidelberg, Germany. He has contributed to several open-source software projects, including the ns-3 network simulator, GROMACS molecular dynamics software, CP2K quantum chemistry and solid-state physics software, Clang C/C++ compiler frontend, LLVM compiler backend, and Mesa 3D graphics library.

Contacts:

Patrizia Poščić
Head of the Department
University of Rijeka, Department of Informatics, Croatia
gsm: +385 914800237
email: patrizia@inf.uniri.hr

and

Ana Meštrović, Martina Ašenbrener Katić, Vedran Miletić
University of Rijeka, Department of Informatics, Croatia

emails: amestrovic@inf.uniri.hr; masenbrener@inf.uniri.hr; vmiletic@inf.uniri.hr