Joseph, this is absolutely open to the public. Welcome.
My undergrad was CS with a Bioinformatics emphasis, though I haven't
used it much. The rest of your email disappeared, but if someone has
expertise in a field that people are interested in and can explain it
like I am five years old, then maybe we could tackle some more
specific papers.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cga/behavior/rabiner1.pdf - A Tutorial on
Hidden Markov Models and Selected Applications in Speech Recognition
is interesting, but the math is pretty intense for me in some parts.
I have also been looking at Indexing By Latent Semantic Analysis -
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cga/behavior/rabiner1.pdf, which is related to
natural language processing and information retrieval. It has some
linear algebra, but seems less intense, and shorter, than the Hidden
Markov Model one.
>
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/papers-in-computer-science/-/50RK8BX2oTcJ.