Auburn Engineering doctoral student Ye Wang was chosen to participate in the Google Summer of Code, a global program that allows students to immerse themselves in open-source software development. 

Wang worked alongside two mentors on a software project titled “Tree-regularized convolutional Neural Network (tCNN) for microbiome-based prediction.” Wang’s research focuses on deep learning, a subset of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and its application in biomedical data, particularly for large-scale omics data and population-based epidemiological data. 

With the development and decreasing cost of next-generation sequencing technologies, the study of the human microbiome has become a growing research field as it can be applied to large clinical applications such as drug response predictions, patient stratification and disease diagnosis. Wang’s summer project aimed to improve this field and bolster his doctoral research in hopes of being published in a future conference. 

Since its inception in 2005, the Google Summer of Code program has brought together more than 14,000 student participants with 24,000 mentors from more than 118 countries.