Lawrence Hunter

Key takeaways

Lawrence Hunter belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Lawrence Hunter to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Lawrence Hunter from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Lawrence E. Hunter is a professor at the University of Chicago. He was the founder and director of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an internationally known scholar, focused on computational biology, knowledge-driven extraction of information from the primary biomedical literature, the semantic integration of knowledge resources in molecular biology, and the use of knowledge in the analysis of high-throughput data, as well as for his foundational work in computational biology, which led to the genesis of the major professional organization in the field and two international conferences.

Education Hunter completed his PhD at Yale University in 1989 with a thesis on Knowledge Acquisition Planning: Gaining Expertise Through Experience, on diagnosis of lung cancer from histological images using Case-based reasoning, under the guidance of Roger Schank.

Career and research Faced with a choice between careers in the main applications of artificial intelligence---game programming and defense work—Hunter chose an emerging new discipline, bioinformatics. From 1989 to 2000, Hunter worked as a computer scientist and section chief for National Institutes of Health sections devoted to statistical and bioinformatic research. He was an adjunct faculty member at George Mason University from 1991 through 2000 and an associate professor in the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine from 2000 to 2008. He was promoted to professor in 2008. He moved to the University of Chicago in 2024.

ISCB In 1997, Hunter founded what has become the largest professional organization in computational biology and bioinformatics, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).

Conferences Hunter was also a founder of three successful international conferences in bioinformatics, the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) and the Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference. He is also a co-organizer of the biological visualization conference Vizbi. Hunter cofounded and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Molecular Mining Corporation from 1997 to 2003.

Awards, honors and influence Hunter is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the winner of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2003 Engelmore Prize for Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence. Hunter is credited with being one of the founders of the field of bioinformatics. Throughout his career Hunter has researched and directed research groups investigating the development and application of advanced computational techniques for biomedicine to high-throughput assays, particularly the application of statistical and knowledge-based techniques, in particular bio-ontologies, to the analysis of high-throughput data and of biomedical texts. He has proposed neurobiologically and evolutionarily informed computational models of cognition, and ethical issues related to computational bioscience. He has argued for expansion data science activities in biomedicine to include knowledge-based methods. He became an ISCB Fellow in 2010. Other awards and honors include Regent's Award for Scholarship and Technical Achievement 1994 Meritorious Service Award, National Library of Medicine, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 Excellence in Research Award, University of Colorado School of Medicine Department of Pharmacology, 2007 Excellence in Teaching Award, University of Colorado School of Medicine Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, 2004.

Publications Selected publications include:

Rindflesch, T.; Tanabe, L.; Weinstein, J.; Hunter, L. (2000). "EDGAR: Extraction of drugs, genes and relations from the biomedical literature". Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing: 517–528. doi:10.1142/9789814447331_0049. ISBN 978-981-02-4188-9. PMC 2709525. PMID 10902199.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link) Schank, R. C.; Collins, G. C.; Hunter, L. E. (1986). "Transcending inductive category formation in learning". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 9 (4): 639. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00051578. S2CID 144458369. Rindflesch, T. C.; Rajan, J. V.; Hunter, L. (2000). "Extracting molecular binding relationships from biomedical text". Proceedings of the sixth conference on Applied natural language processing -. pp. 188–195. doi:10.3115/974147.974173. S2CID 16166432. Planning to learn The Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Boston, MA., July 1990, pp. 26–34, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. in. Hunter, Lawrence (1993). Artificial intelligence and molecular biology. Menlo Park, Calif: AAAI Press. ISBN 978-0-262-58115-8. Baumgartner, W. A.; Cohen, K. B.; Fox, L. M.; Acquaah-Mensah, G.; Hunter, L. (2007). "Manual curation is not sufficient for annotation of genomic databases". Bioinformatics. 23 (13): i41–i48. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm229. PMC 2516305. PMID 17646325. Hunter, L.; Lu, Z.; Firby, J.; Baumgartner Jr, W. A.; Johnson, H. L.; Ogren, P. V.; Cohen, K. B. (2008). "OpenDMAP: An open source, ontology-driven concept analysis engine, with applications to capturing knowledge regarding protein transport, protein interactions and cell-type-specific gene expression". BMC Bioinformatics. 9: 78. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-78. PMC 2275248. PMID 18237434. Leach, S. M.; Tipney, H.; Feng, W.; Baumgartner, W. A.; Kasliwal, P.; Schuyler, R. P.; Williams, T.; Spritz, R. A.; Hunter, L. (2009). Miyano, Satoru (ed.). "Biomedical Discovery Acceleration, with Applications to Craniofacial Development". PLOS Computational Biology. 5 (3) e1000215. Bibcode:2009PLSCB...5E0215L. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000215. PMC 2653649. PMID 19325874. Hunter, Lawrence (2009). The processes of life: an introduction to molecular biology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-01305-3.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Lawrence Hunter

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Lawrence Hunter claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Lawrence Hunter before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Lawrence Hunter ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Lawrence Hunter

In research: Lawrence Hunter appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Lawrence Hunter in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Lawrence Hunter is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1961 births, American bioinformaticians, Artificial intelligence researchers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Lawrence Hunter outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Lawrence Hunter in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Lawrence Hunter means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Lawrence Hunter out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Lawrence Hunter in simple terms?

Lawrence E. Hunter is a professor at the University of Chicago.

Why does Lawrence Hunter matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Lawrence Hunter?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Lawrence Hunter.