Keywords:
Computational Biology
Protein Structure Prediction
Cellular Automata
Bioinformatics
Complex Systems
Discrete Dynamical Systems
The research activity of Pietro Di Lena focuses on Complex
Systems, Bioinformatcs and Computational Biology. In the
context of Complex Systems, the research activity of Pietro Di Lena
focuses on the investigation of computational properties of a
specific class of Discrete Dynamical Systems, known as Cellular
Automata. In particular, in this area his research activity is
mainly oriented to the investigation of possibile intersections
between Computation Theory and Dynamical Systrem
theory. In the context of Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology the research activity focuses on the
development of heuristic algorithms for the computationally hard
problems in computational biology. In particular, Pietro Di Lena
developed efficient methods for the reconstruction of protein
three-dimensional structure from their map of contacts, alignment
algorithms for contact maps and subgraph-matching procedures for
biological networks. Furthermore he developed Machine
Learning-based methods for the prediction of structural features in
proteins, such as prediction of protein contact maps.