Friday Hacks #160, October 12
Posted on by E-Liang
Date/Time: Friday, October 12 at 7:00pm
Venue: The HANGAR by NUS Enterprise
How Stellar Built a Universal Value Exchange Protocol
Stellar is encrypted crypto network that is based on the SCP/PBFT world-wide consensus algorithm, one of the world’s most secure encrypted cryptocurrencies. Stellar is also an open protocol for the exchange of value, with a huge number of network nodes of global currencies to guarantee its security, reliability, and trustworthiness.
Michael Ran is an engineer and technical advisor working for Stellar, he will talk about basic concepts of Stellar, what is the design consideration for the global value exchange protocol, and answer any question you might have about blockchain world.
Cancer Genome Analysis at Scale
Talk Description:
For decades, scientists and clinicians have envisioned genetic information playing an inevitable — and significant — role in medical practices. Decreasing sequencing costs and continuous technological improvements now allow us rapidly characterize individuals’ genetic variation, bringing precision medicine closer to actualization. However, the subsequent influx of data increases the cost and complexity of downstream analyses. Substantial hardware resources are necessary but not sufficient to leverage these data streams. Sophisticated software solutions are required to harness the scientific and clinical opportunities enabled by contemporary sequencing technologies — particularly at scale. In this talk, I will briefly discuss 1) our Scalable Workflows for the Analysis of Genomes (Swag) software, 2) profiling and predicting performance of bioinformatics applications on Amazon Web Services, and 3) how integrating these approaches into an autonomic framework will allow researchers to perform efficient and cost-optimized genomic analyses.
Speaker Profile
Dr. Jason Pitt earned his Bachelor’s degree in Biology w/ Honors from Gustavus Adolphus College. He subsequently earned his PhD in Genetics, Genomics, and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago. Currently, Dr. Pitt is a Special Fellow at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore where his laboratory uses analytics, novel software, and data-intensive computing to delineate the genetic aberrations that facilitate cancer development.