Two hundred biologists and computer scientists gathered at the first-ever Sage Congress have proposed creating an open source model that standardizes and links together thousands of scientific databases worldwide. In the future, such a system could give researchers and scientists access to thousands of raw genetic data samples that could then be connected and used to explain how a disease functions. Sage Bionetworks, a new nonprofit that organized the conference, also plans to build systems that can mimic the human body and help researchers analyze complex interactions among networks of genes. Merck has agreed to pass on some technology from the disbanded Rosetta project, which resulted in one of the fastest supercomputers in the drug industry. Open source technology will likely be used, and projects such as Science Commons are working to overcome the legal, financial, and infrastructural barriers to sharing studies and data.
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Microsoft’s annual TechFair visited Silicon Valley so that Microsoft product teams and local research labs could see the latest developments. One spotlighted TechFair project seeks to supply more data to researchers studying strategies for protecting fish in San Francisco Bay Area waterways by using computers to mash up various data sources and present the results to scientists in an Excel spreadsheet. Microsoft tools are making it possible to more deeply analyze the numerous variables that are weighed in deciding the optimum underlying conditions for migratory salmon. Microsoft research lab director Rick Rashid says the same core system is being used to monitor weather data in Southeast Asia and seismic data in the Swiss Alps. Ensuring that researchers maintain individual privacy when they offer aggregate data was the focus of work by TechFair presenter Cynthia Dwork, who demonstrated a mathematical formula for determining whether a particular data set is likely private or not. Also on display at TechFair was a project investigating the possibility of a smartphone choosing on the fly whether to run parts of a program on the phone itself or transmit the computational work to a remote server or PC.
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