The Strategy Board My former colleagues at the Broad Institute recently published a marvelous case study. They describe, in a delightfully brisk and jargon-free way, some of the process improvements they used to radically increase the productivity of the genome sequencing pipeline. This post is…
I’ve spent most of my career on the uncomfortable edge of technology. This meant that I was often the one who got to deal with gear that was being pushed into production just a little bit too early, just a little bit too fast, and…
We’re back around to one of my favorite events of the Boston biotech year, The Bio-IT World Expo. This conference has been host to a bunch of critical conversations for me. My favorite example happened in 2004. That was the year that the founders of…
Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege to serve as the chair of a working group (computing) for the GP-Write project. I’m spending today at GP-Write’s annual meeting in Boston. GP-Write is a highly international, rapidly evolving collaboration with a goal of rapidly advancing…
I just had a personal experience with how timely, personal measurements can drive better health and lifestyle decisions. Unfortunately, it wasn’t related to any of the times that I’ve been genotyped, nor was it in the context of care by any physician. In fact, I…
I promised that I would post a summary from our closing panel at the Converged IT and the Cloud thread at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference. Unfortunately, I was having so much fun in the session itself that I didn’t take any notes at all. Please…
I’m in San Francisco this week, attending the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference. I’m specifically focused on a new track called Converged IT and the Cloud. I’m paying particular attention and taking notes – both because it’s very interesting and exciting, because also because at the end…
There’s a particular class of problem that I’ve grappled with regularly over the past decade. I got to go another round just before the holiday break. I figured that this was as good a time as any to share some thoughts. Multiple representations Some file…
Yesterday, I got to solve a puzzle that I’ve solved more than a few times before. “How do we get a moderate amount of data from here to there in reasonably short order?” The specifics in this sort of puzzle change all the time. What…
Earlier this week, Google published DeepVariant, a machine learning (ML) based tool for genomics. The software is now available on the DNANexus platform. This is kind of a big deal, and also kind of not a big deal. Does it matter? It’s a big deal…