Killing HIV with Lessons from Spam mails

Could you have imagined that lessons from fighting spam e-mails may be used in finding vaccines for HIV? That's exactly what scientists at Microsoft's Machine Learning and Applied Statitics Group are doing. Spam mails are really bothersome. Nearly 40% of e-mail traffic in 2006 came from spam mail. To fight spam, scientists realized that some of the best ways to do this was to train computers to differentiate between spam mails and regular mail. Now they are using the same methods to train computers to predict which peptides derived from HIV may applied in vaccines. They have also released a number of tools for computational biology available at the Microsoft Computational Biology Web Tools. Read more on October 1st issue of BusinnessWeek.