One of the things that we’ve got going for us as technologists is that the underlying reality of biology changes pretty slowly. The human genome has been the same size for at least the last 10,000 years, and maybe as long as 300,000 years depending…
I’ve noticed a shift in the AI conversation lately. Folks seem to be converging on the idea that “AI” means systems that create artifacts (text, images, video, sound, code) so similar to those made by humans that it is hard – for the untrained eye…
I attended three industry conferences (Bio-IT World, Rev4, and BIO) over the last four weeks. This post shares my big-picture takeaway from each conference, as well as a bit about how they stitch together. I think that I may be the only person who attended…
I used to make a pretty decent living installing the Linux operating system on bare metal servers. Nobody does that anymore, or at least nobody brags about it on social media, which is basically the same thing. It was a good gig. I traveled the…
More than 20 years ago, fresh out of school in the 90s, I built artificial intelligence (AI) systems for a military contractor. I trained neural nets, used natural language processing to populate decision support systems, experimented with genetic algorithms, and refined support vector machines. In…
Let me start off by agreeing that yes, the network is slow. I’ve moved a fair amount of data over the years. Even when it’s only a terabyte or two, the network always seems uncomfortably slow. We never seem to get the performance we sketched…
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…
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…
I had the opportunity to write a white paper for Elastifile about the challenges and opportunities as we shift large quantities of genomic data from traditional on-premise NAS systems to the cloud. If that’s the sort of thing that interests you, check it out here:…