Computational biology and genomics
I started learning about bioinformatics back in the days when a lot of bioinformatics was done in Perl. Nowadays I don’t see much Perl used in new tools, which are mostly written in Python or R or both. Perl was dominant back in the day because you could get work done quickly. Perl is a…
Like many people who work in bioinformatics, my background was in biology and had nothing to do with computers. As I worked longer in this field, my responsibilities grew from writing code and performing analyses to setting up and maintaining servers (and the many unofficial tasks that an IT help desk are supposed to do,…
There’s this quote that is commonly attributed to Albert Einstein (though it’s uncertain whether he really said it or not): Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I first came across it a long time ago, when I was much less discerning. After reading it, I envisioned someone…
I have been interested in machine learning since I was a PhD student back in 2010. I was always in awe of papers where they applied machine learning to cluster or classify data. My original PhD topic was to discover biomarkers in blood for Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients that were early onset and had not…
As you may have heard, Stack Overflow (SO) and OpenAI have recently announced a partnership, which basically just means allowing OpenAI to train models using data from SO and then selling these models. Kathy Reid summarised the problem perfectly: Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the…
The old adage is that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks because it is usually difficult to change people’s habits, traits or mindset. One reason may be because an "old dog" has done enough exploration and they want to exploit/reap the benefits of their previous ground work. They have dedicated a lot of…