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Biohackathon

Posted by michael on from the make-your-pledge-now dept.

wjv writes: "Open source Bioinformatics hackers from around the world are meeting in the first ever Biohackathon to hack, eat, hack, sleep, hack... The South African Business Day has the scoop, or see our weblog. The event is co-sponsored by my employer and O'Reilly. I'm typing this from the hackathon, and you wouldn't believe the buzz... or the scenic venue!"

5 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. not the first! by jilbert · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually this is not the first biohackathon.

    This is a follow up to the fist which was held
    in Arizona.

    1. Re:not the first! by wjv · · Score: 4, Informative

      Technically it's the second part of a two-part hackathon. The first part was held (as you rightly mention) in Tucson, Arizona. Following that, everyone was given the chance to go home and catch their breath, and now it's on to the part two.

      The original intention was (I believe) that part one would be "talking" and part two "hacking". But as it happens, a lot more got done in Tucson than most attendees anticipated.

  2. The problem behind the problem by dgroskind · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative, for the National Institutes of Health, says: Today the disciplines of computer science and biology are often too far apart to help one another. A computer-science student often stops studying other sciences after freshman biology or chemistry; a biology student, even one knowledgeable about computers, may not ever have had formal computer-science classes. Biomedical computing needs a better -- and more attractive -- meld of those disciplines. Today computer-science students have little incentive to learn about biomedicine. The barrier is not just the rigorous demands of computer science, it is also the relative rewards: The $50,000 to $80,000 a year that professional programmers earn makes the compensation associated with many research positions in biology laughable. This situation is even more risible when one includes the reality that staff positions on NIH research grants are guaranteed for no longer than the grant award.

    This is a problem in every field of scientific computing but it is particularly acute in biology because of the bizarre and heterogeneous data set. Ultimately, the question is whether it is more efficient to teach a computer science student biology or teach programming to a biology student.

    People who go into computer science typically do so because of fascination with the tools and techniques, not because they are interested so much in the data. The scientific mindset of the biologist might transfer to computer science much easier than the mindset of the programmer transfer to biology.

    The computer has the same fundamental status in biology as the microscope. Computer science in the form of bioinformatics should perhaps be as basic to the study of biology as organic chemistry.

  3. Bioinformatics.org.... by deep6d · · Score: 3, Informative

    is a site that houses open source Bioinformatics applications. You might want to try there.

  4. Re:Learning Bioinformatics by deep6d · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am almost finished with my Bioinformatics Cert from UCSC and the stress of the program is on Molecular Biology and dealing with data from instruments such as microarrays and algorithms that are frequently used like BLAST. The programming languages that appear to be used most are Java and Perl.

    A great resource is the National Center for Biotechnology Information's website at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.

    It houses genomic/protein data, tools, and pubs related to the field.