Computers May Be As Good As (Or Better Than) Human Biocurators

Shipud writes "Sequencing the genome of an organism is not the end of a discovery process; rather, it is a beginning. It's the equivalent of discovering a book whose words (genes) are there, but their meaning is yet unknown. Biocurators are the people who annotate genes — find out what they do — through literature search and the supervised use of computational techniques. A recent study published in PLoS Computational Biology shows that biocurators probably perform no better than fully automated computational methods used to annotate genes. It is not clear whether this is because the software is of high quality, or both curators and software need to improve their performance. The author of this blog post uses the concept of the uncanny valley to explain this recent discovery and what it means to both life science and artificial intelligence."

Comments

"biocurators"?

[smoothnorman]

in all my too many years [hack spittoo] of biochemistry bioinformatics bio-whathaveyou this is the first i've heard of the term "biocurators". and i gotta say, i don't like it. no-sir, not a bit.

"curator mid-14c., from L. curator "overseer, manager, guardian," agent noun from curatus, pp. of curare (see cure). Originally of minors, lunatics, etc.; meaning "officer in charge of a museum, library, etc." is from 1660s." so, "life + manager" or "life + officer in charge of a library" ...nah.

'geneannonator' ....maybe

Re:"biocurators"?

[Shipud]

You must not be reading th etop journals in the field: http://www.ploscollections.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0020142

Re:"biocurators"?

[Shipud]

This is no science journalism. It's the site of the International Society of Biocuration. which has about 1500 members to date. http://colleagues.biocurator.org/affiliations it's too bad that you are ignorant of the field: http://www.ploscollections.org/article/browseIssue.action?issue=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fissue.pcol.v03.i05

Re:"biocurators"?

[Yvanhoe]

I concur. It took me a while to understand that "biostatistics" is simply statistics with no specific mathematical tool...

Re:"biocurators"?

[PopeRatzo]

It is good that you have those papers. Since you have yet to demonstrate that you can effectively use the English language for communication.

Brother, I am to the written word what Picasso was to painting, what Robert Mapplethorpe was to photography, and what Rahsaan Roland Kirk was to the saxophone.

You won't understand how great I am until somebody else tells you. Or, until I die, which could be any minute now with this goddamn heat here in Chicago.

Now I'm going to go out back and take a soak in the kiddie pool. While I'm out there, I want you to think about what I've said. Later, you can explain it to me. because I don't have a clue. These strawberry daiquiris hit like a jackhammer on a hot day like this one.

Re:"biocurators"?

[PopeRatzo]

I know you're at least partly exaggerating for humorous effect

"partly"?

I didn't mean to offend.

And you're certainly correct that literary critics are among the worst of the lot when it comes to horrible neologisms.

I believe that combinatorics is among the most beautiful of the Maths. The name is just a mouthful. Bit so is "deconstructionism".

And regarding my horrible stereotyping of biologists: my beautiful daughter is engaged in the study of biomathematics (which now makes me officially the stupidest person in the house). I certainly have nothing but admiration for the geeks with lab coats and large pores that have been hanging around my house lately emptying the refrigerator and trying to flirt with my daughter who is still too young for serious dating. You see, I have been among grad students before. I know they only have one thing on their minds. Well, maybe two things if you count all that science stuff.

Nothing in TFA says the machines are better

[bbartlog]

In fact rather the opposite - it says that the reliability of the machines is 'competitive' or 'rivals' the human curators. That's marketing speak for 'not quite as good just yet'.

misunderstanding the concept of "uncanny valley"

[slew]

This author seems to have inappropriately compared the "fear" of machines doing better than humans with concept of uncanny valley.

The concept of the "uncanny valley" is that the affinity of humans for observing the appearance or behavior of a human-like entity (robot, alien, whatever) has this unexpected dip when it is too close to the human behavior (we have this apparent built-in viceral problem with the entity). However, this is only true when it is trying to mimic human-like behaviors. If it's doing something totally different or totally exceeding human behaviors (say distinctly non-human speed, accuracy, strength, appearance, etc), the uncanny valley doesn't say anything about affinity, in fact, if you were to extrapolate the curve out, humans might even have more affinity for these "super-human" behaviors. Maybe that's why many express affinity for live-action versions of comic book super-heros, or airbrushed models in magazines. The behavior is so far from the uncanny valley that it doesn't invoke the supression response that is responsible for it.

Just like what was once observed with "space-shuttle" pilots, the computers can probably do a better job at this task, but we don't quite trust them yet (for some reason). That's really just the human fear of being replaced by machines, not uncanny valley. Note that the only people fearful about this behavior are the people that are likely to be replaced (and maybe a few that sympathize with them)...