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
Will we ever see a biosciences startup school?
April 20, 2008
YCombinator just organized startup school #4. According to TechCrunch, there was a crowd of over 650 developers, writers, and entrepreneurs at Stanford. The event gives techies the chance to learn, network and, perhaps most importantly, pick the brains of industry stalwarts like Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen and ask questions about venture capital, IP law, and other aspects of the startup process.
I can’t help but wonder if we will ever have a similar forum for the biosciences; a place where graduate students with ideas, postdocs, or young science types (or even older ones like yours truly) can gather to talk to VCs, compare notes, etc. Innovation in the sciences has always had small academic roots and you all know that I feel that the way this innovation reaches people, whether through public availability, non-profits or via commercialization needs to change. There are so many smart young people out there in the sciences. By changing the environment, by exciting people about the possibilities of collaboration, recognition and/or potential business opportunities we can get even more people excited about the biosciences, and the world will only benefit from that. Social networking might be cool, and in many cases useful, but scientific discovery has benefits that are far greater. Time to get VCs and entrepreneurs (not just scientists) more involved in a new model.
Postscript: I wonder if there is a way to cast what a startup mentality/culture in the life sciences really means. It doesn’t have to be commercial. Any thoughts?
YCombinator logo via Wikipedia
Technorati Tags: YCombinator, Startup School, Entrepreneurship, Innovation
Thoughts on a Science Exchange
April 17, 2008
Cameron has written a wonderful post about a Science Exchange, distilling a varied set of thoughts, including one by Shirley. It’s clear there are problems and that we need a new system.
I also feel that our future doesn’t lie just with government funding, but increasingly with institutions like the Gates Foundation, or Google.org. Perhaps such an exchange can be funded by a combination of micro-funding and “investors”, who, in essence are enabling the future. If one can layer something like iBridge Network on top of that, that would be even better
That said, I would not mind seeing the scientific equivalent (or equivalents) of Stackoverflow for starters. We need that too.
Technorati Tags: Microfunding, Science Exchange, Collaboration
Bio::Blogs - The engineering edition
March 7, 2008
Bio::Blogs #19 has a decidedly engineering theme this time round and is appropriately hosted by Duncan Hull at O’Really
Technorati Tags: Bio::Blogs
Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services
March 3, 2008
Jeff Barr is an evangelist for Amazon Web Services (which apparently is its own LLC). I’ve had the fortune to interact with Jeff on many occasions. He’s a great guy, a geek, and passionate about what he dooes. He also has a keen interest in pushing Amazon’s infrastructure to the life science modeling and informatics crowd.
One of the videos, part of the launch of FastCompany.tv, is an interview with Jeff. Check it out. You get a sense of what AWS is all about.
Technorati Tags: Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr, FastCompany.tv
