Bio-IT World Day 3 - Linda Avey Keynote
April 30, 2008
Bio-IT World day 2 - iPhones, Virtualization, EC2 and the Semantic Web
April 30, 2008
A quick report on Day 2 of Bio-IT World.
The day started with a keynote by Josh Boger, founder and CEO of Vertex. His talk spanned several real world examples and some food for thought. Highlights
- Vertex has made active use of a MedChem ELN, which has been extended to their entire MedChem community, including external partners. In his own words the goal was “enabling the virtual research organization”
- Metric of success was user adoption and there were some good analytics supporting uptake
- He spoke at length about the HCV program, where they have used extensive predictive modeling and simulation
- Clinical data has backed up their predictive modeling (they’re in Phase III now)
- They have avoided some experiments (carried out by competitors in one case) that their models suggested they avoid
- He ended by talking a lot about communication and how technology can impact the healthcare system. Much of this section of his talk was around the iPhone. For example how the iPhone can be used to track RFID tagged pill bottles, patient exercise regimens, carry patient records, monitor weight, etc. They’re actually implementing some of these ideas
There were many other talks to attend, and I won’t bore you with some of the details, but I will talk about one talk, a talk by Chris Dagdigian of The BioTeam, a small boutique consulting shop, which readers of this blog will know via mentions of Michael Cariaso. Chris spent a lot his talk discussing the economics of storage and the kinds of storage, etc available these days and trends in storage and computing. Perhaps it shows how much of a geek I am, but this was a dream talk, one full of hardware specs, pictures of data centers, etc. It is clear that virtualization is big; Chris’ preference being Xen. There was a cool slide on meta-virtualization (a virtual machine inside a virtual machine inside a virtual machine). Two thoughts really resonated with me; first was his distaste for classical Grid Computing, which I have long considered impractical for most companies. The second was his strong support for Amazon Web Services, especially EC2. Apparently, every single BioTeam consultant has independently deployed an EC2 solution, i.e. they’ve all come to the same conclusion. Can’t wait to see this talk next year to find out where they’ve gone with AWS. One thing he said which also resonated was to talk about the death of the small cluster. Today and in the future, we will either have multicore (8-16 cores) on our desktops or dial up cloud resources. His slides will be available somewhere. Can’t wait to get my hands on them. This was a GREAT talk.
One of the highlights for me was attending the W3C Semantic Web HCLSIG lunch. I got to meet people I know (Eric Neumann), people I have interacted with online (Vipul Kashyap) and followed (John Wilbanks from Science Commons). And I got to say hello to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who needs no introduction.
Another highlight for me. I got to finally meet Joe Landman, whose JackRabbit got a good plug in the BioTeam talk as well. It was great to meet Joe with whom I’ve been having a conversation via our respective blogs for quite a while now.
Met several former colleagues and customers as well. Bio-IT World has definitely been one of the better conferences I have had a chance to attend in terms of interest and people.
Image via Wikipedia
Technorati Tags: Bio-IT World, W3C, BioTeam, BioIT
Bio-IT World Day 1 - Visualization, the cloud and people
April 29, 2008
Detailed blog posts will follow when I have some additional cycles, but thought I’d share some quick thoughts on day 1 of Bio-IT World. My conference started with a workshop on data visualization, which was mostly about the importance of visualization for making sense of multidimensional data sets and what kind of visualizations could be done. My take aways from the talks
- There was a distinction made between statistical methods and data mining and presenting information to humans.
- Life science data is inherently multiscalar and reducing dimensions without losing information or creating artifacts is not trivial
- Importance to create systems that can help scientists go through a workflow and predict visualizations, and help guide the user to the most appropriate visualization for the relevant questions
- APIs are important for Pfizer. If a full API is not available, they are not interested in a visualization package
- and last but not the least, as I Twittered during the workshop, they need to invite Ben Fry to give a talk on visualization. I am sure he would have a lot to contribute
Perhaps the highlight was the keynote by John Reynder from Johnson and Johnson PRD. He gave us a tour of his experiences through his career, including his time at Los Alamos. The talk was not in any great depth, but I left it very encouraged. Encouraged that the head of an IT organization at a large pharma company understood the value of collaboration, understood that innovation happens everywhere, and needs to be tapped appropriately and a lot of information is pre-competitive and should be shared across companies. Other things he talked about
- The cloud :). There was a slide on how to dial up storage and cycles, with AWS prominently mentioned
- Collective intelligence. He spent a lot of time on collective intelligence, from knowledge and innovation networks, to connecting people internally and talking about using new ways to make tools available and connecting people together. There was a suitable amount of web 2.0 jargon and frequent mention of the Semantic Web as essential to the life sciences.
- We have the compute power, but the gap comes from the software.
- He also warned about getting too caught up in the technology and losing sight of the problem
Would have been nice to have open data mentioned explicitly, but he clearly said that pharma needs to appreciate data and information sharing.
Bio-IT World means meeting old friends, especially from my Accelrys days as well as finally meeting people I admire from my online life, with a special shoutout to Michael Cariaso
On tap on Day 2 - Electronic Data Capture, high throughput data management, supercomputing and a W3C lunch
Image via Wikipedia
Technorati Tags: Bio-IT World, BioIT, Visualization
Health 2.0 roundup
March 6, 2008
Been too busy this week to do a good job following the Health 2.0 conference, so I am going to link to some coverage from other blogs (people who were there).
David Hamilton points to six startups that are re-inventing the doctor-patient relationship including Phreesia, which I’ve covered before.
The appropriately name Health 2.0 blog has a submission from Dan Kogan of HealthWorldWeb, where he talks about some of the themes that arose at the conference, and his opinion on what startups are doing and what needs to be done.
Bill Allman from HealthCentral.com reviews the conference for ReadWriteWeb.
One theme in all the discussions I have seen, and its somewhat obvious, is that that the healthcare system in the US is in bad shape and erroneously focussed. While some of the efforts today might seem somewhat trivial, or “me too” effort, it is clear that there are people there willing to work both with and outside the system. Will the system change? How soon will it change? Are we ready?
While you ponder those thoughts, don’t forget to drop by The Health Care blog where you can get commentary on the Health 2.0 conference from the horses mouth. Matthew Holt has a series of posts and videos from the conference.
Technorati Tags: health 2.0
PLoS Biology, TED, EOL, BIL and BioBricks
February 25, 2008
A bunch of semi-related newsitems, shoehorned into a single post.
PLoS Biology has a new Academic Editor-in-Chief, and in fellow scifoo Jonathan Eisen, they couldn’t have found a better candidate. Jonathan, who’s been an academic editor for a while, is an OA champion, a wonderful scientist, and best of all, one of the most fun people to read or meet in person.
Meanwhile, this is TED week. As anyone remotely connected to bbgm knows, TED is a favorite around these parts. Since I have already watched every video they have ever released on their wonderful website, it’s time for a new batch and voila, TED 2008 is just round the corner. Check out the list of speakers.
Speaking of TED, former TED prize winner, E. O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life is supposed to finally go live this Thursday (probably to coincide with TED. Could he be one of the surprise speakers?)
Update: Looks like it’s already up
Right as TED ends, Monterrey will host BIL, the “open source” version of TED (and has been blessed by TED). I was planning to go, but other matters are going to keep me away.
At the same time, on March 1, UCSF is playing host to the BioBricks Workshop, which I blogged about earlier. I am still scheduled to attend, although that’s beginning to look a little dicey.
Technorati Tags: PLoS Biology, Jonathan Eisen, Open Access, TED, BIL, BioBricks, Encyclopedia of Life
