This week at BUG, Stephen Ramsey will be describing a unique collaborative project funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to build a Biomedical Translator. This is a software system that connects various distributed databases of biomedical knowledge and that has the capability to “reason” over these knowledge sources to answer various types of questions, such as:

  • “how does atorvastatin protect against heart attacks?”
  • “what genetic conditions might be protective against malaria?”
  • “what genes are known to be associated with liver cancer?”

OSU is the lead institution for one of five teams that NCATS has funded to build a key “reasoning engine” part of the Biomedical Translator. Dr. Ramsey will describe the Translator effort, its unique collaborative culture and organizational structure, its scientific goals, and its progress to date. The talk will also highlight some interesting technologies, such as graph databases and network analysis algorithms.

 

WHAT: Bioinformatics Users’ Group / The NCATS Translator project: towards reasoning on biomedical data

WHERE: *** LiNC 314 ***

WHEN: Wednesday (March 14) Noon to 1pm

  

The Bioinformatics Users Group consists of scientists in the life sciences, computing, math, statistics, and other areas who meet to discuss topics related to those fields. Meetings are generally informal, consisting of discussions, interactive talks, or short workshops. No experience needed to participate. For questions or suggestions contact teaching@cgrb.oregonstate.edu, or find us on Slack at https://osu-cgrb-bug.slack.com