biology

When people hear about Globus Online they probably think of simplified online file transfer using a GUI. And while this is certainly true, what some people don’t realize is that, in addition to the nifty Web 2.0 interface, Globus Online also provides a powerful API developers can use to integrate Globus Online into their own applications, to localize the transfer experience.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to dramatically influence the way in which clinical care and medical research is conducted. Pilot studies have shown that NLP engines, such as MedLEE and MetaMap, and the use of community-defined medical ontologies like the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), can help to more accurately identify disease risks and environmental factors in patient clinical narratives. In addition to helping improve disease diagnosis, NLP can help automate the analysis of patient narratives over extended visits and across a wide sampling of subjects.

I get a kick out of seeing "ordinary" information technologies make new kinds of science possible. For example, the ability to move and share digital data is a pretty mundane topic in computer science circles. The mass market entertainment industry (think: iTunes, Netflix) has even brought streaming data and multi-megabyte files into our living rooms--for fun! Despite this dramatic adoption and transformation in some industries, there are still plenty of areas where the effects are being felt for the first time.

I think I can speak for most biologists when I say I never thought I would be worrying about file transfer.  Compute power, yes.  Storage space, maybe.  But file transfer?  Never. Unlike some other scientific disciplines, biology is not a traditionally ‘big data’ science.  Generally, biologists produce data on the scale suited to e-mail attachments.  However, seemingly overnight, biology has been propelled into the ranks of the big data sciences.  Now a biologist can easily find herself confronted with terabytes of data.  Why the change?  The answer lies in the recent quantum leaps in DNA sequencing technology.