Biography and Interests

Mike Travers is a Computer Scientist in the Bioinformatics Research Group at SRI International, where he works on symbolic biocomputing, knowledge representation, and human interface issues. He holds degrees in Mathematics and Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, where he did research on artificial life, learning environments, and agent-based computing at the Media Laboratory. His work focuses on the intersection of knowledge representation, visualization, and discovery. An experienced interaction designer, he has exhibited interactive installations at the SIGGRAPH Art Show and the Boston Computer Museum. He has held research positions at MIT AI Laboratory, IBM, Xerox EuroPARC, MCC, and the Centre Mondial in Paris. He was Director of Human Computer Interface at joined Afferent Systems, a startup building advanced tools for chemoinformatics, and has work worked on numerous other commercial and academic projects in life science informatics and semantic computing.

Current Projects

Pathway Tools Pathway Tools is a systems biology software system that supports several use cases: Development of organism-specific database that integrate many bioinformatics datatypes, from genomes to pathways. Development of metabolic-flux models using flux-balance analysis. Scientific visualization, web publishing, and querying of organism-specific databases. Analysis of omics datasets. Computational prediction of metabolic pathways, metabolic pathway hole fillers, and operons. Comparative analyses.

Publications

The following are in reverse chronological order of publication.
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• 7. Caspi R, Altman T, Dreher K, Fulcher CA, Subhraveti P, Keseler IM, Kothari A, Krummenacker M, Latendresse M, Mueller LA, Ong Q, Paley S, Pujar A, Shearer AG, Travers M, Weerasinghe D, Zhang P, Karp PD. The MetaCyc database of metabolic pathways and enzymes and the BioCyc collection of pathway/genome databases. Nucleic Acids Res, vol. 40, no. D1, pp. D742-D753, 2012.  [PDF, Details]

• Vidwans, S.J. and Flaherty, K. T. and Fisher, D. E. and Tenenbaum, J. M. and Travers, M and Shrager, J. A Melanoma Molecular Disease Model. PLoS One, 2011.  [Details]

• Travers, M. Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction, in Inconsistency Robustness 2011, 2011.  [PDF, Details]

• Tenenbaum, J M and Shrager, J and Travers, M. Cancer Commons: Biomedicine in the Internet Agein Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research, John Wiley and Sons, 2011.  [Details]