We are a team of scientists working on computational methods for biological data analysis. One of our focus areas is the application of machine learning methods to genomics data. This year, we welcomed several interns for machine learning-related projects. Due to the pandemic, we had to run these internships remotely…

Cancer is a major public health and economic issue and its burden is ever increasing. Only in the US, it accounts for $90 Billion in direct medical costs. It costs $2.7 Billion to develop a cancer drug. About 9.5 million people die of cancer every year. This is higher than…

Accept that failure is the default outcome The smartphone above is a Motorola Droid 1, the first generation, also known as A855. This was one of the first things I bought, when I started my postdoc in New York in 2010. My work involved doing computations on large-memory servers or the compute cluster. So, I just needed…

Can bioinformaticians easily switch to data science roles? What kind of challenges should they expect? Is their skill set adequate for data science ? — There is much interest in data science from biology and medical science community these days. The researchers from these fields are generating massive amounts of data and naturally, as any field that has access to large data sets, people are interested in what “data science” can offer. The hope is…

What do pipelines do? Why do we need them? Pipelines are computational tools of convenience. Data analysis usually requires data acquisition, quality check, clean up, exploratory analysis and hypothesis driven analysis. Pipelines can automate these steps. They process raw data to a suitable format and analyze it with statistical tools or machine learning models in a streamlined way. In…