TriSano [pronounced "tri-SAH-no"]: http://www.trisano.org/
"Collaborative Software Initiative today announced the launch of the TriSano application and community. TriSano is an open source, citizen-focused infectious disease surveillance system that allows local, state and federal entities to collaborate for the good of public health. With TriSano, the Collaborative Software Initiative provides a forum in which subject matter experts (i.e., doctors, nurses and epidemiologists) and software developers work together to facilitate the creation of citizen-centric public health applications. This innovation ensures application features meet the specific requirements of each jurisdiction, allowing public health employees to achieve the goal of protecting lives."
"The TriSano™ Eye represents a zooming (micro/macro) view on disease detection and prevention. That is as close as I'm ever going to get to a bird of prey reference in a product. I love birds of prey. They have binoculars for eyes just like TriSano. Its true. Look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_of_prey"
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
VBrowser Plug-in
I have been in contact with Piter De Boer, primary developer for vBrowser. Piter provided me with some direction and code for creating a custom plug-in for vBrowser. I was also added to the developer mailing for the vBrowser project. I'll begin exploring ways to add actual Grid Services to the vBrowser interface, starting with GridMedLee.
Peter's impression of the PHIN conference
Last week, I attended two Atlanta conferences, The first was the Public Health and Informatics Network (or PHIN) conference, and the second was Dragon*Con. This is why I was out Friday and yesterday: I needed to recuperate. What I learned at the PHIN conference is much more relevant to the interests of this blog.
First off, the demo of RODSAdai went okay on Monday, and blessedly it was the first event attended. That way, we showed it live and we got to answer questions about it and then we were done and I didn't have to worry about something crashing for the entire conference. It was very nice to see people talking the RODSAdai demo I did and the awesome VBrowser demonstrations Dan Washington set up, and it was inspiring to see all the philosophies amalgamated around our demos. There was a small hiccup in that the VPN timed out
The other big thing on Monday was getting to see Dr. Jeremy Espino's RODSAdai demo. His presentation was interesting because it focused on how to get people with similar intrests to contribute code to your project... and how to make your projects as friendly as possible for someone to go "Hey, I have this idea for how to .enhance your code to do this thing I need/want it to do" while still making sure said someone doesn't accidentally delete the source tree. I was actually used as a test case, because I was a developer chosen to code "how do we get information from these two unrelated RODS databases using GRID?" It was really neat because I also got some high praise for the quality of code I was contributing, and praise always makes me happy :D .
After the demonstrations. I went to dinner with a large bunch of Grid folk including Brian Lee, Jeremy Espino, Albert Lai (who is working to distribute the Natural Language Processor engine across grid), a CaBIG engineer, and a BE Architect whose names escape me. We talked a lot about the state of grid and what some of the impediments were to getting grid spread around the US and linking it up with the rest of the globe. The biggest thing I came away with is that we really need to have things in a tight little package, because going "take this box and run 'install' on this disk" is going to be the a lot easier sell to the beleaguered medical center sysadmin than "buy this box and then install these 400 programs in this order". It was lovely meeting everyone face to face.
On Tuesday, I attended the morning session while eating breakfast and heard a very good speech by a Georgia health official about why communities of practice are important... and then I went to the Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice and saw that there were a lot of things to sort out, including purpose and definition. After that I went to man the BearingPoint booth, where I sat in the paint station and asked people to complete parts of a paint-by-colors mural to be given away as a prize to a particular health center.
Finally on Tuesday, I went to the PHGrid concurrent session, where a lot of the things discussed on Monday night were reviewed again with a focus on Security and Performance.
Wednesday, I started by eating breakfast and going to the Plenary session which had a cool presentation about "PHIN 2018" which basically looked at how things were going to change slowly then rapidly over the future as goals were discussed and changed. , I attended a session for the evaluation of detection systems developed by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL). The sessions were neat because they outlined the informatics and statistical analysis that went into detecting outbreaks. Basically, statistical analytical models were coded to detect outbreak conditions as they were appearing. The machines could then "learn" from mistakes (missed outbreaks, false alerts) and adjust their standards for statistical patterns accordingly. There were pretty cool examples of how the outbreaks were detected more accurately as time went on. Another speaker also went over his experiences in evaluating a new system designed for replacing the old one... complete with sitting behind the users, documenting the process, and seeing if that process would be supported or enhanced by the new system without introducing any new pain points. He did not reccommend the replacement, and it still hasn't been adopted as predicted. It was a great demonstration of a real world enterprise evaluation.
Then there was an awards lunch... and there was some conflict with people wanting to eat and talk rather than listen to the presenters. I think in the future the conference should have the "eat-and-talk" section of lunch, and then the "your food is gone, go outside if you need to keep chatting" presentation section. After that was the second section of the Enterprise Architecture CoP... and this time we made more progress for mapping our motives and definition. I think one of the best ideas was to make a "city map" for what a phin machine would be and who would be providing it.
Finally on Wednesday was the "Visualization and Analysis" panel... where I got to see all the cool Diginet work done by Carl Kincaide and Jim Tobias. They had basically done another version of a visualization and amalgamation tool that did the same sort of thing RODSAdai did, but they did it with a completely different platform. Thus, it shows a sort of convergent evolution and the ability to get the same results with different toolkits and starting environments.
On Thursday we spent the morning meeting with several different people. A lot were the coders from JHU APL, Jeremy and Albert were there, and the others were some of the Utah CaBIG coders... and we basically set up another Community of Practice that centers around "we've all met and talked about things lets keep on tabs with each other and what we are working on. The basic discussion was focusing on thing like making very easily deployable boxes and how to roll out some of these cool Proofs of Concept to production... and I sort of threw out there that one of the things that would need to be done is just to get one health department to try it, love it, rave about it, and then say "oh look, this is free and you can set it up too" and the desire for the ease the visualization or analysis will find more homes for our product and allow them to link up.
Overall the conference was very cool and I enjoyed meeting a bunch of the people I had worked with and probably will be working with well into the future.
First off, the demo of RODSAdai went okay on Monday, and blessedly it was the first event attended. That way, we showed it live and we got to answer questions about it and then we were done and I didn't have to worry about something crashing for the entire conference. It was very nice to see people talking the RODSAdai demo I did and the awesome VBrowser demonstrations Dan Washington set up, and it was inspiring to see all the philosophies amalgamated around our demos. There was a small hiccup in that the VPN timed out
The other big thing on Monday was getting to see Dr. Jeremy Espino's RODSAdai demo. His presentation was interesting because it focused on how to get people with similar intrests to contribute code to your project... and how to make your projects as friendly as possible for someone to go "Hey, I have this idea for how to .enhance your code to do this thing I need/want it to do" while still making sure said someone doesn't accidentally delete the source tree. I was actually used as a test case, because I was a developer chosen to code "how do we get information from these two unrelated RODS databases using GRID?" It was really neat because I also got some high praise for the quality of code I was contributing, and praise always makes me happy :D .
After the demonstrations. I went to dinner with a large bunch of Grid folk including Brian Lee, Jeremy Espino, Albert Lai (who is working to distribute the Natural Language Processor engine across grid), a CaBIG engineer, and a BE Architect whose names escape me. We talked a lot about the state of grid and what some of the impediments were to getting grid spread around the US and linking it up with the rest of the globe. The biggest thing I came away with is that we really need to have things in a tight little package, because going "take this box and run 'install' on this disk" is going to be the a lot easier sell to the beleaguered medical center sysadmin than "buy this box and then install these 400 programs in this order". It was lovely meeting everyone face to face.
On Tuesday, I attended the morning session while eating breakfast and heard a very good speech by a Georgia health official about why communities of practice are important... and then I went to the Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice and saw that there were a lot of things to sort out, including purpose and definition. After that I went to man the BearingPoint booth, where I sat in the paint station and asked people to complete parts of a paint-by-colors mural to be given away as a prize to a particular health center.
Finally on Tuesday, I went to the PHGrid concurrent session, where a lot of the things discussed on Monday night were reviewed again with a focus on Security and Performance.
Wednesday, I started by eating breakfast and going to the Plenary session which had a cool presentation about "PHIN 2018" which basically looked at how things were going to change slowly then rapidly over the future as goals were discussed and changed. , I attended a session for the evaluation of detection systems developed by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL). The sessions were neat because they outlined the informatics and statistical analysis that went into detecting outbreaks. Basically, statistical analytical models were coded to detect outbreak conditions as they were appearing. The machines could then "learn" from mistakes (missed outbreaks, false alerts) and adjust their standards for statistical patterns accordingly. There were pretty cool examples of how the outbreaks were detected more accurately as time went on. Another speaker also went over his experiences in evaluating a new system designed for replacing the old one... complete with sitting behind the users, documenting the process, and seeing if that process would be supported or enhanced by the new system without introducing any new pain points. He did not reccommend the replacement, and it still hasn't been adopted as predicted. It was a great demonstration of a real world enterprise evaluation.
Then there was an awards lunch... and there was some conflict with people wanting to eat and talk rather than listen to the presenters. I think in the future the conference should have the "eat-and-talk" section of lunch, and then the "your food is gone, go outside if you need to keep chatting" presentation section. After that was the second section of the Enterprise Architecture CoP... and this time we made more progress for mapping our motives and definition. I think one of the best ideas was to make a "city map" for what a phin machine would be and who would be providing it.
Finally on Wednesday was the "Visualization and Analysis" panel... where I got to see all the cool Diginet work done by Carl Kincaide and Jim Tobias. They had basically done another version of a visualization and amalgamation tool that did the same sort of thing RODSAdai did, but they did it with a completely different platform. Thus, it shows a sort of convergent evolution and the ability to get the same results with different toolkits and starting environments.
On Thursday we spent the morning meeting with several different people. A lot were the coders from JHU APL, Jeremy and Albert were there, and the others were some of the Utah CaBIG coders... and we basically set up another Community of Practice that centers around "we've all met and talked about things lets keep on tabs with each other and what we are working on. The basic discussion was focusing on thing like making very easily deployable boxes and how to roll out some of these cool Proofs of Concept to production... and I sort of threw out there that one of the things that would need to be done is just to get one health department to try it, love it, rave about it, and then say "oh look, this is free and you can set it up too" and the desire for the ease the visualization or analysis will find more homes for our product and allow them to link up.
Overall the conference was very cool and I enjoyed meeting a bunch of the people I had worked with and probably will be working with well into the future.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Phin Conference Experience
Hi all, here's my phin conference experience. Considering the fact that I have never attended a professional conference of this size, its safe to say, I was truly impressed. At the same time, it gave a lot of perspective on where we fit in the big picture. I especially liked the format, where they kept 3 speakers per session so it never felt like its dragging. But all in all a lot of information to consume and analyze. I really liked the session about MedLEE and the application outlining the research grid services by Wayne Loschen. Also had a long chat with Ron Price about the various aspects of security evaluation of the Grid. I also enjoyed Vaugh Mcmullin's presentation about the impelementing a Data Grid leveraging Secure reliable transport, clustered node data sets using existing open source and concepts utilized by PHIN with one particular point of emphasis being making application device independent. To add further, it was a really good idea to assemble on thurday, following the conference, with all the grid collaborators and outline next steps and focussing on preventing redundancy of work. All in all, I would say an enriching experience which will lead to bigger things in terms of Grid research.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
PHIN Impressions - from the Savel
Greetings all...
Those who know me...know that I am a profound PHIN evangelist. This year's conference had a significantly different feel from the previous years - and was...a great conference.
I moderated many sessions - and all were very strong and well attended. Of course, I thought that the GRID-related sessions were outstanding.
Take-away issues: There was a lot of buzz around "grid" - and it's clear that over the next few months, a lot of coordination and communication needs to take place.
From the sessions and ad-hoc meetings I attended, it is very clear to me that we have just cracked open the door into the world of grid / distributed computing. What's behind that door? Something amazing... of this I have no doubt. What will it look like? Time will tell - and that's the beauty of research and discovery.
We are discovering the pieces of the puzzle - and with the amazing collaborative effort of our national and international partners....it's clear that we will be making amazing progress in the months ahead. It's a true privilege to be part of this effort.
Just think for a moment about a few of the pieces of the puzzle we have discovered:
Taverna (essentially yahoo pipes for distributed computing)
DCQL
VBroswer
Globus
MonALISA
OGSA-DAI
GridGrouper
Gridifying Services via caGRID tools
As we work closely with our public health partners - we look forward to providing the public health community powerful new tools and resources.
I can only imagine the progress we will have made - before the 2009 PHIN Conference.
Those who know me...know that I am a profound PHIN evangelist. This year's conference had a significantly different feel from the previous years - and was...a great conference.
I moderated many sessions - and all were very strong and well attended. Of course, I thought that the GRID-related sessions were outstanding.
Take-away issues: There was a lot of buzz around "grid" - and it's clear that over the next few months, a lot of coordination and communication needs to take place.
From the sessions and ad-hoc meetings I attended, it is very clear to me that we have just cracked open the door into the world of grid / distributed computing. What's behind that door? Something amazing... of this I have no doubt. What will it look like? Time will tell - and that's the beauty of research and discovery.
We are discovering the pieces of the puzzle - and with the amazing collaborative effort of our national and international partners....it's clear that we will be making amazing progress in the months ahead. It's a true privilege to be part of this effort.
Just think for a moment about a few of the pieces of the puzzle we have discovered:
Taverna (essentially yahoo pipes for distributed computing)
DCQL
VBroswer
Globus
MonALISA
OGSA-DAI
GridGrouper
Gridifying Services via caGRID tools
As we work closely with our public health partners - we look forward to providing the public health community powerful new tools and resources.
I can only imagine the progress we will have made - before the 2009 PHIN Conference.
Friday, August 29, 2008
PHIN Impressions
Pros:
I found the PHIN conference to be a valuable learning experience. I particularly enjoyed visiting the vendors in the exhibit hall and viewing the various Public Health technology solutions.
The session that I enjoyed the most was the Natural Language Processor presentation. The speaker was enthusiastic about the technology and provided insight on real world use cases. It was also nice to understand the technology that we are currently integrating with grid.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the person who came up with the PHIN bag idea. It works great as a laptop bag!
Cons:
I didn’t enjoy the lunch sessions because I had a difficult time hearing the speakers due to the noise level in the room. A separate networking lunch would have been instrumental in reducing the amount of chatter during those sessions.
I found the PHIN conference to be a valuable learning experience. I particularly enjoyed visiting the vendors in the exhibit hall and viewing the various Public Health technology solutions.
The session that I enjoyed the most was the Natural Language Processor presentation. The speaker was enthusiastic about the technology and provided insight on real world use cases. It was also nice to understand the technology that we are currently integrating with grid.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the person who came up with the PHIN bag idea. It works great as a laptop bag!
Cons:
I didn’t enjoy the lunch sessions because I had a difficult time hearing the speakers due to the noise level in the room. A separate networking lunch would have been instrumental in reducing the amount of chatter during those sessions.
My First PHIN Conference Experience
My first PHIN conference experience was awesome. I started my conference experience on Sunday attending two pre-conference sessions, Web2.0 for Public Health and PHIN101, both sessions were very good and provided a wealth of useful information. The next three days were packed with many interesting presentations covering everything from GIS applications to vocabulary. I have included links to some of the tools and projects that were mentioned during some of the sessions I attended, enjoy.
Tools/Projects:
Eclipse Open Health Framework - http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/
Cobertura - http://cobertura.sourceforge.net/
JFreeChart - http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
Selenium - http://selenium.openqa.org/
Taverna - http://taverna.sourceforge.net/
ConceptHub - http://www.concepthub.org/wiki/Main_Page
Creative Commons - http://creativecommons.org/
Thin Wire - http://sourceforge.net/projects/thinwire/
Open ID - http://openid.net/
Cruise Control - http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
Ivy - http://ant.apache.org/ivy/
Public Health Partners - http://phpartners.org/
*** Orange Data Mining - http://www.ailab.si/orange - very interesting gui programming tool using python scripts
Tools/Projects:
Eclipse Open Health Framework - http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/
Cobertura - http://cobertura.sourceforge.net/
JFreeChart - http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
Selenium - http://selenium.openqa.org/
Taverna - http://taverna.sourceforge.net/
ConceptHub - http://www.concepthub.org/wiki/Main_Page
Creative Commons - http://creativecommons.org/
Thin Wire - http://sourceforge.net/projects/thinwire/
Open ID - http://openid.net/
Cruise Control - http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
Ivy - http://ant.apache.org/ivy/
Public Health Partners - http://phpartners.org/
*** Orange Data Mining - http://www.ailab.si/orange - very interesting gui programming tool using python scripts
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Grid UI Update
Here are couple of more UI's for the Grid, I found
1) http://wiki.arcs.org.au/bin/view/Main/FileTransferSGGCUsageGuide
from Australian research collaboration service which has the capabililty for gridFTP, third party transfers, and also a cool feature which is multi replica transfers. Its sort of like bittorrent with the variation like when we have a large file whose copy exists in several locations, we can specify multiple locations from where we want to get the file which will potentially create a local copy of the file faster.
2) The other one is http://commons-vfs-ui.sourceforge.net/ which is a Commons VFS implementation from Apache. It provide support for Storage Resource Broker and GridFTP.
1) http://wiki.arcs.org.au/bin/view/Main/FileTransferSGGCUsageGuide
from Australian research collaboration service which has the capabililty for gridFTP, third party transfers, and also a cool feature which is multi replica transfers. Its sort of like bittorrent with the variation like when we have a large file whose copy exists in several locations, we can specify multiple locations from where we want to get the file which will potentially create a local copy of the file faster.
2) The other one is http://commons-vfs-ui.sourceforge.net/ which is a Commons VFS implementation from Apache. It provide support for Storage Resource Broker and GridFTP.
Face to face collaboration
Due to people being in town for the PHIN conference, we had a face to face meeting this morning with many of the phGrid collaborators.
It's nice to finally put faces to voices and email addresses and even though telepresence is useful, there's still no beating flesh and blood for easily communicating. Although we still had a dial in line as some of us couldn't be there in person.
We talked with Pittsburgh, WashingtonU, UtahU, Johns Hopkins APL, Ohio State BMI, Columbia University and NCPHI Lab.
We recapped the services built and demonstrated and also talked about next steps.
The immediate agreed upon next steps are to plan out how to connect together the services developed by different groups, set up some sort of simple description set of each service to let others know about service information, link to each others public source code repositories, find some specific public health use cases to drive future development and extend our current set of services.
There's actually a lot more around next steps but it is too much to describe in this post. Over the next week, we're collecting the next steps together and will post some more ideas for future proof of concept projects.
We also talked about some ways to approach collaboration and source control. Ohio State has two really good examples of how they do it:
CaGrid Incubator
CaGrid GForge
It's nice to finally put faces to voices and email addresses and even though telepresence is useful, there's still no beating flesh and blood for easily communicating. Although we still had a dial in line as some of us couldn't be there in person.
We talked with Pittsburgh, WashingtonU, UtahU, Johns Hopkins APL, Ohio State BMI, Columbia University and NCPHI Lab.
We recapped the services built and demonstrated and also talked about next steps.
The immediate agreed upon next steps are to plan out how to connect together the services developed by different groups, set up some sort of simple description set of each service to let others know about service information, link to each others public source code repositories, find some specific public health use cases to drive future development and extend our current set of services.
There's actually a lot more around next steps but it is too much to describe in this post. Over the next week, we're collecting the next steps together and will post some more ideas for future proof of concept projects.
We also talked about some ways to approach collaboration and source control. Ohio State has two really good examples of how they do it:
CaGrid Incubator
CaGrid GForge
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
PHIN Conference
The blog has been quiescent this week because the entire team has been at the 2008 PHIN Conference in Atlanta, GA demoing and talking about grid, as well as learning more about public health informatics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
