News & Events

Metadata Mixer: Andrew R. Cohen and Tony Hernández

Time: Tuesday February 6, at 4PM
Location: Rush 006

Speaker: Andrew R. Cohen
Title: Combining human insight and algorithmic tenacity to make compelling movies of cancer, development and aging

Abstract: Modern microscopes capture high-resolution views of live cells & organelles as they undergo the dynamic processes of disease and development. The time-lapse images, or movies, are 2-D and 3-D, with multiple channels capturing separate biological structures. The data is too vast to analyze by hand or by eye, and too complex for computational analysis alone. To make best use of these movies requires software tools to enable human domain experts to visualize and interact with the data, and a new class of software tools capable of efficiently learning from those human interactions. The problem demands a distributed computing paradigm, with both stand-alone and client-server systems designed to process the movies, to visualize the images and analysis results, and to capture and manage human interactions and annotations.

This talk will describe a new set of software tools called ‘leverjs’ that are designed to visualize, analyze and annotate biological microscopy image data. Distributed visualization, storage and analysis algorithms will be introduced. The challenges discussed will include secure interfaces for both human and algorithmic access, as well as methods for incorporating annotations and authorization results in the computational analysis. Example movies in 2-D and 3-D will be shown from applications including cancer biology and drug discovery as well as human and mouse developmental studies.

Bio: Andrew Cohen joined the faculty in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University as an associate professor in August 2012. Before coming to Drexel, he was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in May 2008 working with Prof. Badri Roysam. His postdoctoral research on developing computational approaches to quantifying deficiencies in axonal organelle transport due to neurodegenerative disease was funded by the Cure Huntington’s Disease Foundation. Dr. Cohen was previously employed as a software design engineer in the DirectX group at Microsoft where he designed operating systems software for gaming applications and as a microprocessor product engineer at Intel Corp. Dr. Cohen is a senior member of the IEEE.

Speaker: Tony Hernández
Title: Curator-e: scraping and classifying research groups in Spain.
Abstract: How to get automated metadata from heterogeneous sources of websites. Discover awareness, attitudes, and practices of Spanish research teams when sharing research data in data repositories or journals require first to know which research groups are working with research data and to extract metadata from web content pages.