Keynote Speaker

We are excited to announce that our keynote speaker for SciBarCamp will be:

Sean Mooney, PhD
Associate Professor and Director of Bioinformatics
The Buck Institute for Age Research
Novato, California

Sean will be giving his talk starting at 4pm on the first day of SciBarCamp (July 8th).  Below is the abstract outlining Sean's talk.

Biomedical Research in the Age of Cyberinfrastructure

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 bioinformatic service providers, data managers and biostatistical 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.  I will then discuss the views of individual researchers, data providers and administrators striving to create better science with their data.  Finally, many difficulties remain, and current issues will be discussed.