Big data in life sciences and public health

Abstract

Summary form only given. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. The recent proliferation of extremely large datasets due to high-throughput instrumentation in sciences and engineering, ubiquitous deployment of sensors, and birth and rise of social networks, have resulted in numerous data-driven challenges that are now captured by the umbrella term "big data". This talk will have two parts. In the first part, I will brief the audience on the ongoing federal initiatives in Big Data in the United States. The second part will focus on my group's research in big data, focused on supporting applications in the life sciences. In particular, I will describe big data problems arising from advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing and our work on developing parallel methods to support genomic and metagenomic applications driven by these advances.