Gene-disease annotation with Mobianga

Over the summer, an enterprising high school student named Nishant Mandapaty approached our research group about doing a project with us.  He found us through the "Crowdsourcing Biology" group that we created for the Google Summer of Code program.  To make a long story short, he has been doing good work for us ever since, quickly learning what he needs to on his own. His primary...
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Results from the Cancer Biology game: The Cure

Building intelligent systems for biologyOur research group has been exploring the concept of serious games for several months now.  Aside from providing nerdy entertainment, our games collect (and distribute) biological knowledge from broad audiences of players.  The hypothesis underlying this work is that, by capturing knowledge in forms suitable for computation, these games make it...
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The Cure Round 2 underway

Come see a fresh new interface and a more challenging set of boards in round 2 of The Cure!http://genegames.org/cure/Will Barney defeat us?  Only you can stop him!The SAGE challenge finishes in two weeks and we need you to play to show what The Cure can do!Play...
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Grant Proposal for your Review

Dear Internet,A penny for your thoughts on the grant proposal accessible here.  If you were on the committee that decided the fate of this proposal (and in a very real way, its authors), what would you say?  Go jump in a lake?  This is fantastic?  Why?In a nutshell, we* propose to build some serious games that will translate key biological data curation and interpretation...
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Human Guided Forests – HGF

Yesterday I posted some slides about an idea I had recently which I call Human Guided Forests or HGF for short.  This an attempt to marry crowdsourcing with machine learning to produce better class predictors for datasets with very large features spaces.  Specifically, the idea is to replace the 'random' in the Random Forest algorithm with 'human'.Random Forests basically work like...
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Scientific Games in Genome Biology

Happy New year everyone! In case you are looking for some inspirational reading to start off 2012, Andrew and I wrote a Research Highlight for Genome Biology on Games With a Scientific Purpose.  Kudos to Andrew for convincing them to make it open access so you can actually read it... Research highlight      Games with a scientific purpose Good BM,...
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