Around the time I joined the lab, a Fellow-new-person-but-smarter genius also joined as a summer intern. The Fellow-new-person-but-smarter genius, was once a Software engineer for Infosys Technologies Ltd where he developed the Java/J2EE based E-Commerce website Spring and Hibernate Web Application framework which included
• Designing proof of concept (PoC) for Warehouse Inventory Management using Sterling IBM Ecommerce Development tool for Distributed Order Management
• Working on Localization and Internationalization module for the website
• Integrating and testing Sterling OMS with Oracle SQL and JSP using Java, Hibernate and Spring MVC framework

The Fellow-new-person-but-smarter genius, Vyshakh Babji joined the Master’s program in Computer Science at San Diego State University and has taken part in several successful projects.

As part of the Su Lab, Vyshakh is working on an outgrowth of The Cure: Branch. The Cure was a challenging game which allowed players to help scientists to select genes for predicting breast cancer survival. See the recently released paper on The Cure here. As a game, The Cure was a quite challenging for players with no expertise in the field of breast cancer, but could be very powerful in the hands of experts. Why not give experts biologists more control in the process of selecting and organizing genes and their associated disease outcomes? Thus was the idea for Branch born, and researchers at the Su Lab like the Fellow-new-person-but-smarter genius, the Insanely-talented-undergrad-genius, and the Young-dad-in-charge-of-too-many-crazy-projects genius have been hard at work building Branch. As a tool, Branch will enable expert biologists to easily engage directly with high-throughput datasets without the need for a team of bioinformaticians. Using a tree building process, Branch allows researchers to rapidly test hypotheses about interactions between biological variables and phenotypes in ways that would otherwise require extensive computational sophistication. In so doing, this tool can both inform biological research and help to produce more accurate, more meaningful classifiers.

Contributing the development of Branch, Vyshakh has:
• Been involved in writing Application work flow both for front end and backend.
• Supported the team in understanding the work flow of the application.
• Developed the business logic using Java.
• Used spring and hibernate for backend development.
• Design & development of web-based programs using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
• Implemented MYSQL/PostgreSQL queries and MYSQL/PostgreSQL stored procedures, and built-in functions to retrieve and update data from the databases.
• Followed Agile methodology for rapid application development
• Used Eclipse Kepler for Code Development and Apache Tomcat7 deployment of the Project.
• Used Groovy based Apache Gadle for building and project automation
• Followed Test driven developed (TDD) throughout the application.
• Performed regression test to check for unintended errors after enhancement.
• Transitioned from Apache Maven to Gradle for previous modules of the project.

Of course, it’s not sufficient to be called a genius simply based on his extensive skills in programming. Vyshakh is a genius because he’s also performed music in NGOs, blind schools, and taught music to poor children.