Transcript Computing in the Life Sciences Simon Mercer Program Manager External Research & Programs Microsoft Research.

Computing in the Life Sciences
Simon Mercer
Program Manager
External Research & Programs
Microsoft Research
The future can take even very
smart people by surprise
“It would appear that we have reached the limits of
what is possible to achieve with computer
technology, although one should be careful with
such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly
in five years.”
John von Neumann, 1949
Basic Research  Agility
Basic research group allows a company like
Microsoft to respond more rapidly to change
Research provides a reservoir of technology,
expertise and people that can be quickly
brought to bear:
New technologies
New competitors
New business models
Augmenting In-House Research
In-House Research
Central to Company Interests
Complete IP ownership
Expensive
External Research
Closer to an “Open Innovation” model
Can explore long term goals and those peripheral to
the current business
Risk profile can be higher – Failure is an Option
Henry Chesbrough - Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology,
Harvard Business School Press, 2003
“There are things that other people get to before
us. We avoid that a lot by working well with the
universities. We have way bigger university
outreach program than any company and that's
worldwide, universities in Europe, India, China.
The US universities are where we get the most out
of that, but we want to make sure we're doing it
everywhere.”
– Bill Gates, Time Magazine interview, March 2006
Collaboration Model
Centers
Institutes
Accelerate Research
Projects
Workshops & RFPs
Validate Directions
Explore Ideas
Supporting Programs – Faculty Summit,
Ph.D. fellowships, New Faculty Awards,
Ecosystem engagements
Activities
eScience Workshops 2004/5
60+ speakers
120+ attendees
Seven countries represented
eScience Workshop 2006 (TBC)
eResearch Institute at Queensland
University of Technology (TBC)
Projects
37 projects in 9 countries
Bioinformatics
Smart Clients for eSciences
Workbenches that handle scientific data acquisition,
management, integration, access, and visualization
Web services that unlock valuable data sets
Computational Science
Function Express Gold: A
caBIG Grid-aware Microarray
Analysis Application
The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid
(caBIG) develops applications to
facilitate individual steps involved in
microarray analysis, but there is no
single application that leverages these
tools in a user-friendly graphical
interface. We will develop a grid-aware
microarray analysis application
producing results which may be
visualized using a rich set of viewers
such as literature-based gene networks,
pathways browsers, graphs, and heat
maps. This tool will serve as a powerful
means to identify previously
underappreciated pathways for
potential new targeted therapeutics.
Rakesh Nagarajan
Washington University
Siteman Cancer Center
Computational Science
Advanced Biomedical
Computing Systems for
Cancer Research
In collaboration with Winship Cancer
Institute, the group is developing a
computation-based cancer research
system. The system consists of
databases, cluster-based computing,
and immersive visualization. With this
system, they will be able to integrate
large amounts of genomic, proteomic,
and molecular/organ imaging data
obtained from cultured cancer cells,
clinical tissue specimens, and solid
tumors to analyze and guide clinical
cancer research.
May Wang
Georgia Institute of
Technology
The Wallace H. Coulter
Department of Biomedical
Engineering
Computational Science
OR-Eye
A secure, reliable, and scalable
distributed application that enables
remote reviewing of the OR component
of the pre-recorded electronic
anesthesia record from any location
where access to the Intranet/Internet is
available.
OR-Eye is now a fully developed,
tested, and piloted product.
OR-Eye2 is designed to completely
replace the paper based anesthesia
record with an electronic version.
Furrukh Khan
The Ohio State University
Computational Science
The Gateway to Biological
Pathways
Developing a Web application called
“The Gateway to Biological Pathways”
to aggregate and unify the existing
pathway databases and provide Web
services for querying the aggregated
datasets based upon the open standard
for pathway data interchange BioPAX
Level 1.
Keyuan Jiang
Purdue University,
Calumet
Information Systems and
Computer Programming
Computational Science
Web Service Access to
Streaming NEXRAD Level II
Radar Data
Linked Environments for Atmospheric
Discovery (LEAD), an NSF funded large
scale cyberinfrastructure for severe
storm forecasting, aims to improve
access through a grid service
architecture to enable access to data
products, services, and processes for
the severe storm researcher and
educator.
Beth Plale
Indiana University at
Bloomington
Computer Science
Computational Science
Computational Tools for
Population Biology
An intrinsic characteristic of societies is
their continual change, yet few analysis
methods are explicitly dynamic. Our
goal is to develop a novel conceptual
and computational framework to
accurately describe the social context of
an individual at time scales matching
changes in individual and group activity.
Finding patterns of social interaction
within a population has applications
from epidemiology and marketing to
conservation biology and behavioral
ecology.
Tanya Berger-Wolf
University of Illinois at
Chicago
Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science
Computational Science
Piccolo.NET
General purpose toolkit, useful for
Information Visualization studies,
Zooming User Interfaces, and other
dynamic UI projects. Fully-accelerated
through managed DirectX 9. For Mobile
Devices, developers can use
PocketPiccolo.NET, built on the .NET
Compact Framework.
Benjamin Bederson
Aaron Clamage
University of Maryland
Human-Computer Interaction
Lab
Computational Science
Notebook Project
The Notebook application is a clientside data repository, collaboration
environment, and smart client for
SOAP-based Web services. The
application is designed to store data
from Internet Web sessions and also
enables researchers to annotate data
locally.
Greg Quinn
University of California at
San Diego
San Diego Supercomputer
Center (SDSC)
Computational Science
iCampus: OpenWetWare
OpenWetWare (http://openwetware.org)
is an effort to promote the sharing of
information, know-how, and ideas
among researchers and groups who are
working in biology, biological
engineering, and related disciplines. By
providing a user-friendly editing
interface (a wiki), the site provides a
place for researchers to organize
information and to collaborate with
other community members. As of May,
2006, more than 50 academic labs from
25 institutions have joined the
OpenWetWare community.
Jason Kelly
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Biological Engineering
Synthetic Biology RFP
“Design and fabrication of biological components
and systems that do not already exist in the natural
world”
“Re-design and fabrication of existing biological
systems”
www.syntheticbiology.org
Synthetic Biology offers:
Great potential
Fertile collaboration
http://research.microsoft.com/compsci/
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