About
Advisor: David J. Foran, PhD
Lab: Center for Biomedical Imaging and Informatics
I am a PhD candidate in the joint biomedical engineering program between UMDNJ & Rutgers. I earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Cornell University in 2006.
I currently work on applications of machine learning and data mining to cancer diagnosis in pathology, with particular focus on multispectral imaging. Other topics of interest include graph theory, data mining, bioinformatics, and dimensionality reduction.
I also partake in good coffee, books, and race for the Rutgers cycling team. I detest poor powerpoint presentations.
Publications
- William J. Cukierski and David J. Foran. Metamerism in Multispectral Imaging of Histopathology Specimens. International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2010. 145 - 148. (PubMed) (IEEE) (pdf)
- Youwen Qian, William Cukierski, Mona Osman and Lauri Goodell. Combined Multiple Clusterings on Flow Cytometry Data to Automatically Identify Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. International Conference On Bioinformatics and Biomedical Technology 2010. (ICBBT), 305 - 309. (pdf)
- Xin Qi, William J. Cukierski, David J. Foran. A comparative performance study characterizing breast tissue microarrays using standard RGB and multispectral imaging. Proc. SPIE Int. Soc. Opt. Eng. Vol. 7557. (pdf)
- William J. Cukierski, Lauri Goodell, David J. Foran, You-Wen Qian. Clustering Analysis for Automatic Gating on Hematologic Flow Cytometry Immunophenotyping. APIII 2009.
- William J. Cukierski, Xin Qi and David J. Foran. Moving Beyond Color: The Case for Multispectral Imaging in Bright-Field Pathology. International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI). June 28-July 1, 2009. 1111-1114. (PubMed) (IEEE) (pdf)
- William J. Cukierski and David J. Foran. Using Betweenness Centrality to Identify Manifold Shortcuts. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Analysis of Dynamic Networks. ICDMW 2008, 949-958. (PubMed) (IEEE) (pdf)
Miscellanea
- MIT Technology Review: Startup Turns Data Crunching into a High-Stakes Sport by Rachel Metz
- Mind Over Market: The Algo Trading Challenge 4th Place Finishers
- The Mode is a Deceitful Beast: William Cukierski on finishing fourth in Dunnhumby's Shopper Challenge
- How I did it - Will Cukierski on finishing second in the IJCNN Social Network Challenge
- William J. Cukierski, Benjamin Hamner, and Bo Yang. Graph-based features for supervised link prediction. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2011. 1237 - 1244 . (IEEE)
- Glamour Magazine photoshoot - Prince William
- SeekingAlpha Op-Ed - Is the Equity Market in its Statistical Infancy?
- Musing - Publish Less, Perish More
Contact
wcukierski {at} gmail.com
Rm. 3521
The Cancer Institute of New Jersey
195 Little Albany Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08903-2681
Answer: Who is ‘Watson?’
Excerpt from Oncolyte, a publication of The Cancer Institute of New Jersey
When one thinks
of cancer research,
one may think of
the traditional test tubes,
beakers and microscopes and
how what is being examined
translates into new treatments
for patients. While traditional
science is a large part of that
dynamic, computer technology
is an equal partner, allowing
researchers to explore the
nuances of the disease in a
faster, comprehensive, more
precise fashion. Under the
direction of David J. Foran,
PhD, members of his laboratory
and the Center for Biomedical
Imaging at The
Cancer Institute of New
Jersey (CINJ) are spearheading
the development of special
computational applications
that can examine and characterize
patterns within cancer
malignancies. By capturing and
cataloguing such massive data,
scientists can further understand
what role protein and
molecule development plays in
disease onset and progression.
Dr. Foran’s team recently was awarded $3.7 million in grant funding to support this cutting-edge work, the majority of which comes from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Included in that is $1.7 million to advance the team’s work in expanding a family of data-mining, imaging and computational tools to further characterize hematologic malignancies. It also supports the development of a computer support system with a large processing capacity in order to perform quick, reliable comparative analysis and classification of various tissue patterns.
By expanding the current suite of tools, Foran’s team will be able to systematically investigate computational markers in a wider range of tissues, cancer types and biomarkers for symptoms of disease, which are used for prognosis and applied toward clinical outcomes.
Related to this project, Foran’s team also received funding from the NIH to integrate pathology imaging data standards that have been developed by Foran’s lab and investigators at Emory University with an existing radiology imaging data standard being developed at Stanford and Northwestern Universities. The resulting effort is designed to support large-scale, multi-site collaborative clinical and research studies involving large cancer data sets.
And perhaps now considered an honorary
member of Foran’s team is Watson – the IBM
computer system which earlier this year beat
some of the best and brightest human minds
on the game show Jeopardy!. Foran was one of
six scientists worldwide to receive a portion
($75,000) of Watson’s winnings to support
the team’s work involving IBM’s World Community
Grid effort. World Community Grid
is a virtual supercomputer that taps into
unused – or idle – computer power of nearly
two-million personal computers in more than
80 countries. This computational power is
then made available to scientists who require
high speed computing for their research.
Foran is applying this power to IBM’s Help
Defeat Cancer project.