Can Siri assist you regain a therapeutic for Cancer the Crab ? As it brook , this is a bit beyond the skill of the talking virtual supporter on Apple ’s iPhone . But British Telecom is put her through a kind of biomedical preparation . Last month , at a league in Boston , BT ’s Bas Burger used Siri to launch a mock experiment that canvass data on the new swarm religious service the companionship build specifically for life sciences R&D.
talk into his iPhone , Burger asked Siri to crunch some number on BT ’s swarm using a common inquiry tool called Pipeline Pilot , and after authenticate Burger , Siri complied . moment by and by , Burger expect her for a position update , and she told him the experiment was complete , offer the results on his phone ( see video below ) .
This Siri - in - lab - coating app was acquit during a conservatory sitting at BT in September that aimed to make it easier for scientist to run online experiments , and it was put together by developers at BioTeam , a Cambridge , Massachusetts - establish consulting firm that serves life sciences research . BioTeam co - founder and director of engineering science Chris Dagdigian state that the app is just a proof - of - concept . “ It proves that we were n’t completely insane when we were thinking about this estimation in a way in the U.K. , ” he say . But it ’s indicative a larger move across the biography scientific discipline field to harness thepower of the swarm calculation .
BT ’s service was one of three cloud offer for aliveness scientist that debuted at last calendar month ’s Bio - IT World league . These include Taiwanese genome sequencing center BGI and sequencing equipment - maker Illumina . And then there ’s Amazon Web Services , the ecumenical - intent swarm that has already regain a plate in life sciences . At the league , pharmaceutical giants Novartis and Bristol - Myers Squibb detailed how they ’re using AWS to improve the drug development appendage , and the service is home to the 1000 Genome Project , which now offers over 1,700 human genome to genetics researchers across the Earth .
According to BioTeam ’s Dagdigian , Genome sequencing information is growing at a pace that outstrip advances in storage technology . A sequence legal document that cost $ 500,000 in 2004 be $ 100,000 six calendar month ago and now cost $ 50,000 , and rather than trust the saving , he says , big research centers are increase the amount of sequence they do . “ alternatively of doing 10 tumor sample , they ’re doing 100 . ”
The problem is n’t so much the raw volume of sequence data this produces . sequence instruments have become very effective . The problem is that researchers are doing more with the data point and generating large , irregular sum of downstream datum , pronounce Dagdigian . “ It ’s very easy for me to mold the technical requirements of an instrument . It ’s much punishing for me to model the storage requirements of a Ph.D. scientist , ” he says .
But the cloud can help , given the elastic nature of base - as - a - serve offering such as AWS . The rub is that using the cloud think moving Brobdingnagian volumes of data . Researchers routinely ship hard driving incorporate terabytes of data to Amazon . handle grow numbers of hard drives is becoming a logistic burden , says Dagdigian , but improvements in networking technology are making it prosperous to move information online . In March , BioTeam participate in a data transfer of training examination that sustain 700 MB per second for more than seven minute . A research laboratory could ship 60 genomes a day at that charge per unit , he says .
Avoiding a data overload crisis , however , is going to require order - of - order of magnitude improvement in the operation , says Dagdigian . One potential rescuer is a new datum - compression data formatting dubbed CRAM that compares sequence datum against a reference genome and only includes the differences . “ It would be cool if storage arrays could natively do CRAM compressing and decompressing on - the - rainfly , ” he says .
And then there ’s Siri , who would in theory help investigator move data to the swarm and analyze it once it ’s there . Today , Siri is not a lab assistant ; she just plays one on YouTube . Apple has yet to relinquish a software development outfit or public API for the tool , so in building their tool , BioTeam developer Bill Van Etten and Adam Kraut reverse to aSiri proxy serverkludge work up by a man named Pete Lamonica .
Freely available on GitHub , the procurator hear to the traffic traveling between your iPhone and Apple ’s Siri servers , wiretap your custom commands , and rout them to the appropriate program . Apple could shut the thing down at any clip with a new translation of its software – though it has n’t so far . A fully automatise life skill cloud is still a ways away . But it ’s coming .
Wired.com has been flesh out the hive mind with engineering , skill and geek culture news since 1995 .
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