Scientific Computing: Bioinformatics

What is bioinformatics? Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of computer technology to the management of biological information that develops and improves on methods for analyzing, storing, and retrieving biological data. It has been started since 1968. In the past three decades, bioinformatics had seen extraordinary development and use in many areas of computer science, mathematics, engineering, and life sciences to process biological data. However, the term bioinformatics is recently invention, and not appearing in the literature until early 1990s. It’s also known as bioinformatics computational biology.

Bioinformatics plays a few important roles such as in the textual mining of the development of biological and gene ontologies; and in analysis of gene and protein structures. However, bioinformatics favor of the development of algorithms, theory and statistical techniques and calculations to solve the problem stems from the need to manage and analyze biological data. Bioinformatics tools aid in the comparison of genetic and genomic data. The comparison of the genes in the same species or between different species can show similarities of protein functions, or relations between the phylogenetic species.

The goal of bioinformatics is to determine the sequence of the entire human genome. Bioinformatics is a powerful new technology for the efficient management, analysis, and search of bio-medical data. The main concern of the bioinformatics is the use of mathematical tools to extract useful information from the chaotic data was collected using data mining technology.

Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics

Computer Graphics: Image processing

What is image processing? Images are everywhere, from those we take with our digital cameras and/or mobile devices and share with our family members and friends to those that we see in the movies and receive from Mars, as well as the whole ensemble of images of our bodies that are taken at dentist office or in hospital visits. Image processing is the art of working with such images. From making it possible to capture, transmit, and store them as blurry and dark images for analyzing the medical data to recognizing our family members and friends’ faces in social pictures. 

There were two robot geologists were launched to Mars in summer 2003 and landed in January 2004. After over eight Earth years, one is still operating. While searching for liquid water on Mars, they took pictures and sent back to Earth so NASA scientists could analyze. How could they do that? They put a camera on the robot, and the pictures were sent to NASA after they were taken. The computer scientists used image management technology such as metadata to interpret, analyze, and store those pictures. Using metadata, they could define the width, height, size, file name and directory, and the date the pictures were taken. They converted between Mars and Earth time. They used Java Message Service for synchronous and asynchronous messaging.

Pics from NASA