I am a bioinformatician

[George K]

Good for you!

[89th]

Cool update, interesting work!

[taiwan_girl]

[Klaus]

Sounds cool! What, more specifically, is your job? Do you write the algorithms yourself? What kinds of algorithms are these?

[Horace]

In this case the algorithms we needed were a clustering algorithm and an algorithm to detect messy data so we don't provide a false positive or false negative. I write them myself, though the reason they had me do it was because they needed to be written very quickly and I've been going around my whole career telling people I can write algorithms. I have in fact been given that opportunity on occasion, and now that I'm in bioinformatics it won't be politically difficult to be more involved in that stuff.

[Klaus]

Aren't libraries containing these kinds of algorithms readily available? Why do you bother to write them yourself?

[brenda]

@Horace said in I am a bioinformatician:

@brenda said in I am a bioinformatician:

Thank you for your work, Horace! If you make a visit to Mayo, let me know.

The way it works is, I create the tool, explain to the marketing folk what the tool does, and then they present it to our users. I never so much as see them on a video call, so I don't anticipate any travel. However I have been interacting with company higher-ups through this project so that's been a rare treat.

Well, if they're not Minnesooota nice to you, let me know. I'll get them in line to behave again.

[Horace]

@Klaus said in I am a bioinformatician:

Aren't libraries containing these kinds of algorithms readily available? Why do you bother to write them yourself?

I would be happy to place any bet on my custom written algorithm to solve these particular problems on this particular data against any standard out of the box algorithm. We do have someone in the bioinformatics group working on a machine learning approach to clustering this sort of data, she has been working on that for many months now, but when it came to this need for this algorithm to be delivered to a customer in very short time, they asked me to do it.

[Horace]

I did end up independently inventing Mahalanobis_distance in the couple days I spent thinking about and implementing this algorithm. I described what I was doing to my boss and he told me it had a name.

[Jolly]

Interesting work that makes a difference.

Can't ask for much more than that...