Description: This paper discusses expressed sequence tag sequencing over grid and cloud computing clusters. Abstract: Computer-intensive biological applications are heavily reliant on the availability of computing resources. Grid based HPC clusters and emerging Cloud computing clusters provide a large scale computing environment for scientific users. However, large scale biological application often involves various types of computational tasks which can benefit from different types of computing clusters. Therefore, a high level job scheduling environment which integrates the Grid style HPC clusters and the Cloud computing clusters and manages jobs accordingly based on the characteristics of the jobs is required. In this paper, the authors propose a Web service framework for high-level job scheduling - Swarm. Swarm is developed for scientific applications that must submit massive number of high-throughput jobs or workflows to highly distributed computing clusters. Swarm allows the users to submit jobs to both Grid HPC and Cloud computing clusters. The Swarm service itself is designed to be extensible, lightweight, and easily installable on a desktop or a small server. As a Web service, derivative services based on Swarm can be straightforwardly integrated with Web portals and science gateways. This paper provides the motivation for this research, the architecture of the ...

Description: This paper discusses a case study on defending design decisions with usability evidence. This case study takes a close look at what novice designers discursively use as evidence to support design decisions. User-centered design has suggested that all design decisions should be made with the concern for the user at the forefront, and, ideally, this concern should be represented by findings discovered within user-centered research. However, the data from a 12-month longitudinal study suggests that although these novice designers are well versed with user-centered design theory, in practice they routinely do not use user-centered research findings to defend their design decisions. Instead these novice designers use less definitive and more designer-centered forms of evidence. This move away from the user, though perhaps unintentional, may suggest that design pedagogy may need to be re-evaluated to ensure that novice designers continue to adhere to the implications of user-centered research throughout the design process.

Description: This paper accompanies an oral presentation on the identification of functional information subgraphs in cultured neural networks. Abstract: We present a general information theoretic approach for identifying functional subgraphs in complex neuronal networks where the spiking dynamics of a subset of nodes (neurons) are observable. We show that the uncertainty in the state of each node can be written as a sum of information quantities involving a growing number of variables at other nodes. We demonstrate that each term in this sum is generated by successively conditioning mutual information on new measured variables, in a way analogous to a discrete differential calculus.