Mailund on the Internet

Brian Vinter pointed this press release out to me: Denmark Creates Network for Gene Sequencing.

CLC bio and several prominent Danish research institutions have established SEQNET — a national network for developing a unique software platform for the analysis of data from the next generation sequencing technologies. The platform will integrate groundbreaking bioinformatics algorithms with a user-friendly and graphical user interface.

Apparently, my good old friend Roald Forsberg is involved:

Senior Scientific Officer at CLC bio, Dr. Roald Forsberg, states, “Next generation sequencing technologies, like 454, Solexa, or SOLiD are pushing a revolution in genetic analysis. Their massive throughput has given rise to a plethora of novel applications for DNA sequencing and has dramatically increased the ambitions of existing projects. However, handling the large amounts of fragmented data presents a great bioinformatics challenge to be dealt with before researchers can get the full value of these new technologies. Since DNA sequencing is becoming omnipresent in research we believe that the answer to this challenge is a unified next generation sequencing platform. In this network, we will make such a platform come together by combining our unique capacities for producing graphical user interfaces, algorithms and high performance computing solutions with the expertise of Denmark’s foremost researchers in the field.”

We have talked about the problems involved in dealing with data from the new high-throughput sequencing technologies a couple of times over lunch, but it seems Roald is moving faster than I am here. Good for him!

I look forward to see where this is leading!

Browsing the Danish Research Council’s homepage — searching for some info on my own grant but failing at that — I stumbled upon this press release (in Danish, sorry). A large project in digital urban living will run in Aarhus the next four years.

I haven’t heard anything about this until today. That really shows how much I’m out of the loop these days. Since I started doing “Real Science” I haven’t been keeping track of what was going on in IT and computer science in town.

Sarcasm on!

Anyway, reading the press release it looks like a lot of the “usual suspect” visions in pervasive computing: mobile phones for news browsing (local news, in this case, probably because they want a digital Aarhus and not just any old digital urban living), mobile phones finding the closes restaurants when you go out, etc.

Let’s ignore for a sec. that I can already do that with any smart phone already. I am sure there are more visions than that…

Well, one thing they mention that smart-phones cannot do is houses changing colour according to the weather. My brick house sort of changes colour between sunny days, cloudy days and rainy days, but all shades of yellow. I am sure changing between red and green is an improvement.

Sarcasm off!

Ok, the press release is a bit daft on the concrete examples, and the remaining examples are too vague to comment on. This doesn’t mean that the project is crap, though. Boiling things down to the length of a press release is bound to dumb it down a bit as well.

I look forward to hear more information about the project. Concrete examples of what they plan to do. Find out what is in it for me! How will digital living change my life? Smart phones, ubiquity of laptop computers and wireless network has changed our life, so there is certainly a potential for IT to change the way we live.

How will this project add to this? Would the money be better spent just providing free wireless Internet downtown? ;-)

The budget is DKK 43.5 million, so it is well funded, and there is a lot of collaborators in it, so it will be interesting to see where it will lead.

More links, but all in Danish, here:

• aarhus.dk: Byrummet i Århus bliver digitalt.
• www.aarhuskomune.dk: Digital Urban Living.
• jp.dk: Byrummet i Århus bliver digitalt.

I’ve just found out that I have DKK 100,000 left on the grant I am funded by until Feb 1st next year (where I move to a different grant but roughly the same research project).That’s a lot of money left to spend in a month and a half.The reason I have that much left is twofold: 1) in the budget I added a salary increase one year into the project that I didn’t get until half a year later (apparently I was too young after one year to move from assistant professor to associate professor level) and 2) I never used the travel budget because most of my travelling instead was paid for by the PolyGene project.Now I’m looking for ways to spend that money.I’ve ordered a new iMac with as high a spec as I can reasonably get, but that only costs about 20,000.For the rest I am thinking about either adding machines to our Linux cluster at BiRC or — if possible through some clever bookkeeping — find a way to use the money over the next year on a student programmer.The later is the nicer solution, ’cause I really have all the computer power I need through Brian Vinter’s grid if only I finish the framework for accessing it, so I will get more use out of a programmer to help with that (and all the other software development we need in the association mapping group) that I would get out of buying more computers.Not that getting more computers for our cluster would be wasted — we are pushing the limit of our system on a weekly basis and using our own cluster has some benefits that are missing on Brian’s grid — I just think I can get more out of a programmer.Of course, getting a programmer requries permission to spend the money over the next year rather than before the end of the grant, so I am not sure how to go about achieving that, but I’ll talk to our accountants to see if it is possible.