Cyber Center

Big Data in Biology: From Genomics to Systems Biology and Medicine

April 30, 2012   Kevin P. White

Kevin White, PhD, combines experimental and computational techniques to understand the networks of factors that control gene expression during development, evolution and disease.  He is a Professor in Human Genetics, Ecology & Evolution and Medicine, Section of Genetic Medicine and Director of the Institute for Genomic & Systems Biology at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.
Kevin White graduated magna cum laude from Yale University with a joint B.S.-M.S. degree in biology in 1993. He completed his Ph.D. in developmental biology at Stanford University in 1998, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in biochemistry and genomics at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. In 2001, he joined the faculty at Yale University as an Assistant Professor of Genetics, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2003. In 2006, he joined the faculty of The University of Chicago.  He was named an NIH Genome Scholar in 2000, a W.M. Keck Distinguished Young Investigator in Medical Sciences in 2003, an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator in 2004, a Pritzker Fellow in 2006 and 2007, and a James and Karen Frank Family Professor in 2006. In 2009, he was elected chairman of the Gordon Conference on Hormone Action in Development and Cancer and in 2012 he was a co-organizer of the Genetics Society of America Drosophila Research Conference.

Building Safe, Thriving Communities with Credible Content: Design Principles for Web Sites and Social Structures

April 9, 2012    Ben Shneiderman

While researchers are far from having reliable predictive models of online community success, a growing body of literature and inspirational examples can provide guidance for aspiring community managers. We know that design principles for websites can make a substantial difference in getting first-time users to return or regular visitors to become content contributors and eventually active collaborators.  Getting active collaborators to become committed leaders is yet a bigger challenge, but having such leaders is one of the keys to community success.  These leaders help set behavior norms by their examples, take the community into new directions, and deal with a wide variety of threats.  Successful communities must develop leaders who create resilient social structures to deal with serious threats from hackers who maliciously violate privacy, attack servers, vandalize content, or provide misleading content.  This talk will cover examples and a road map for research.

On Schema Discovery

April 12, 2012    Renée J. Miller

Structured data is distinguished from unstructured data by the presence of a schema describing the logical structure and semantics of the data. The schema is the means through which we understand and query the underlying data. Schemas enable data independence. In this talk, I consider new challenges in the old problem of schema discovery. I'll discuss the changing role of schemas from prescriptive to descriptive. I'll use examples from Web data publishing and from Business Analytics to motivate the automation of schema discovery and maintenance.

Metadata and Provenance: Fins in the Sea of Data 

March 28, 2012    Beth Plale

The data deluge and discussions of its implications is no longer just the purview of obscure technology conferences. So visible and immediate has the topic become, that it was a topic at the 2012 Davos World Economic Forum.  The data deluge of interest to computer scientists and informatics researchers is the one that impacts science and scholarly research.  If realized properly, this deluge will be a catalyst for new scientific discovery that fuels advances in grand challenge questions such as climate and social-ecological interactions.  Antecedent to these discoveries, however, is the need for deeper understanding of the issues of access and use of the metadata and provenance about scientific data.   On one hand, good metadata and provenance turn data from being write-once, read-none to write-many, read-many; on the other, bad metadata and provenance just contribute in a non-trivial way to the data deluge. 

In this talk I discuss several related research efforts on tools, evaluations, and experiences gained in provenance and metadata use and access that facilitate new forms of access and use of scientific and scholarly data.

BioSENSE: Biologically-inspired Secure Elastic Networked Sensor Environment 

October 25, 2011   Mohamed Eltoweissy

Recently, the Department of Defense has designated Cyberspace as the fifth, and only human-made, dimension of operations. Besides, Cyberspace is becoming the nervous system of our modern society as it is increasingly being integrated in virtually all aspects of control and communication. Today’s Cyberspace comprises highly dynamic, interdependent global network of information technology infrastructures, telecommunications networks, computing systems, integrated sensors, control systems, embedded processors and controllers. Moreover, cyber resources are being tightly coupled and coordinated with their physical counterparts giving rise to pervasive social-cyber-physical environments. These emerging environments promise innovations, new services and significant enhancements in the safety, efficiency and reliability of numerous systems and infrastructures ranging from worldwide social interactions and gaming to smart infrastructure  smart infrastructure systems in energy, healthcare, transportation and emergency response to national security and defense.

 Enabling Data Driven Research

December 2010  Charles Schmitt

Scientific communities have been rapidly expanding their ability to generate and use electronic data for exploration, modeling and simulations, and for generating and testing hypotheses. However, the current emphasis on data-driven discovery has generated new IT and informatics-related challenges that often impede the goals of these communities.   These challenges, especially when coupled with the shifting hardware landscape, are also impacting the ability of campus computational and IT infrastructures to rapidly adapt to scientific demands.   The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) works with various scientific communities to assist in overcoming these challenges by leveraging new research in cyberinfrastructure, computer science, and information sciences.  In this talk, we address the successes and limitations we’ve encountered in meeting those challenges with a focus on the gaps that new research in technology can address to move scientific domains forward. 

To friend and to trust: Eliciting truthful and useful ratings online

November 2010  Lada Adamic

Online rating and reputation systems have shown themselves to be essential for filtering content, building trust, and fostering communities. However, these ratings should not be taken at face value. When individuals submit ratings online, especially ratings of other people, they are being asked to quantify inherently subjective feelings. To complicate matters, they may formulate their ratings differently if these are shown to others, and if those others can reciprocate. In this talk I will present a study that combines data analysis of several online data sets. For one such system, CouchSurfing.org, I will discuss findings from a largescale survey and in-depth interviews to examine from multiple angles the challenges that users have in providing useful and truthful ratings. We find, for example, that the potential to reciprocate produces higher and more correlated ratings than when individuals are unable to see how others rated them. Ratings further can depend on the gender and nationalities of the raters and ratees. All of these findings indicate that ratings should not be taken at face value without considering social nuances.