Artificial Life

I’ve been working on collecting a body of literature dealing with social contagion such as smoking, obesity, sexual behavior, and the like, and I’ve inadvertently stumbled upon some pretty cool studies dealing with false perceptions and memory. I’m going to have spend more time looking at it, but right now I’m only giving things a quick glance.

I’m cataloging and tagging everything I find as part of data collection for the EPiC Project I’m working on with the folks over at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, who are the same folks I was working with when I was working on the Network Workbench project. While I’m still listed as a programmer, I’m only assisting the programming team. My main job is research and as an intermediary between Jim Sherman and the developer team. I’m still participating in the developer meetings, but I’m more involved in translating requirements than actual programming, at least at this point in time.

I’m traveling to Arizona at the end of September to attend the iPlant Collaborative Grand Challenge Workshop. I’m working on a presentation with David Bubenheim of NASA on visualizing spatial and temporal data. We’ll presenting at Biosphere 2, which is incredibly cool.

I have a good friend that is a plant biologist and when I discussed the idea he was quite excited. I’m interested for different reasons, mostly because I think the development of open community tools to facilitate the sharing of information is cool. It drives a lot of my interests and why, as part of my research, I try to make the techniques I use available to the wider public. It is what attracted me to the Network Workbench project in the first place. Being able to take part in this effort as it gets started is a great honor. Oh, and I also get to go to Biosphere 2.

I’ve started a couple of new projects. I’m reading about Auxin receptors in preparation for a collaboration with the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics at Indiana University and Keithanne Mockaitis. I’m also working with Qunfeng Dong from the same center on a method for detecting Chimeric Clones in assembled EST Data.