Topic: Collaboration in the Age of Cyberinfrastructure: Lessons from Biomedicine

Speaker:   Sean Mooney, PhD
                 Director of Bioinformatics and Associate Professor at the Buck Institute for Age Research

Location:   Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley (NASA Research Park Building 23) Room 118
Time:        Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Directions: http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/about-us/directions.html

Slides:      PDF

Abstract:

Software enabling scientific collaboration has continued to mature with the growth of the Internet, web services and Web 2.0 applications.  This has been important in all disciplines, including biomedicine.  Biomedical research continues to be challenged with new technologies, large disparate datasets, and administrative mandates to share data.  Concurrent with these challenges, and perhaps partially in response to them, a growing effort is maturing to create the computer systems that collect, manage, analyze, disseminate and archive biomedical research data at a grand scale.  These systems range from small disparate web services on the Internet to highly ambitious federally funded resources such as the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG).   Together this is an open problem that is shared by informatic service providers, data managers and statistical researchers and can appear to be overwhelming.   Many solutions are being evaluated including Web 2.0 technologies, development and application of biomedical ontology, cloud computing and decentralized service oriented architectures. Our group has spent much effort constructing new resources and provided individual research groups with access to these and other computer systems that together form part of our national research cyberinfrastructure.   In this presentation, I will describe the current state of the computer systems that are driving biomedical research at a high level, focusing on the domain independent tools and their strengths and weaknesses.  I will then discuss the views of individual researchers, data providers and administrators striving to create better science with their data.  Finally, I will discuss challenges that I believe cross disciplines and discuss my thoughts for the future.

Biography:

Sean Mooney received his PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of California San Francisco. He co-directed the Indiana University School of Medicine Bioinformatics Core, and he was also an associate member of the Indiana University Cancer Center. Prior to his appointments at Indiana University, Mooney was an American Cancer Society John Peter Hoffman Fellow at Stanford University in the Department of Genetics and Medical Informatics.