Big Data in Biology (F2)

Biology has arrived at an interesting juncture. The last decade has seen an unprecedented explosion in the amount of information generated by the biological research community, and a concomitant rise in the challenges of sharing, archiving, integrating and analyzing it. This is particularly acute in genomics, where next generation sequencing technologies are accelerating faster than Moore's Law. Serendipitously, this explosion of biological data has come at the same time that computer scientists have developed scalable data management solutions for handling the vastness of the internet; solutions including distributed file systems, cloud computing, and algorithms for efficient data-intensive computation across multiple machines. This conference will bring together biologists and computer scientists from industry and academia to discuss the challenges and trends in this quickly evolving field. The goals include: * Surveying data and computation challenges in the fields of genomics, medical genetics, neuroinformatics, biological imaging and agronomics. * Identifying critical bottlenecks in distributing biological data to the community. * Discussing solutions to growing problem of data sets that are "too big to download." * Debating the tension between community access to personal genomic data sets (e.g. cancer genomes) and potential impact on patient privacy. What makes this conference unique is that it examines a common problem, "How do we handle big data?" across multiple research specialties that rarely interact. We are bringing together plant scientists, medical geneticists, genomicists, microscopists and neurobiologists. The expected outcome is a greater understanding of the challenges each field faces, and the solutions that they have found.