Are We There Yet? - Dr Ajay Royyuru, IBM

Information technology plays a vital role in enabling new science and discovery in biology. Advances in high throughput and platform technologies in biology present an unprecedented challenge in scale, management, and analysis of biological data. Advances in computing architecture and scale are enabling simulations of complex biological processes at various organizational levels from atomic to cellular and beyond.

High performance computing that takes full advantage of massive parallelism is a necessary means to obtain the performance needed to tackle this complexity. Dr Ajay Royyuru’s talk will examine the landscape of computational biology with the lens of computational scale. In particular, an overview of current research in petascale biology and opportunities at the exascale will be examined.

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Electronic Health Records: Legal Issues

In the next generation, it will seem as old fashioned for doctors to give the same tablets to all patients with a heart condition as it once was when the law required a man to walk in front of a motor vehicle carrying a white flag. ‘Precision medicine’ will enable medications and other treatments to be given to patients taking account of their own specific characteristics. To do this effectively, we will need to amend our privacy laws and to have an effective method of securely recording and retrieving patients’ medical details when needed, both to treat that person and to assist in treating his or her blood relatives.

Instead of focussing on the right of individual patients to control their personal information themselves, and not to have information about them collected or used without their consent, we should take a more holistic view. We should acknowledge the potential advantages for patients in having their information recorded in a secure form in a central register which can be accessed by their health professionals as the need arises. This will minimise unnecessary repeated procedures and enable treatment to be personalised for individual patients.

Already, there have been significant steps towards a system of this type, with recent amendments to privacy legislation and research guidelines. The Healthcare Identifiers Bill 2010, a joint initiative of all Australian Governments, is currently before the Australian Parliament. If passed, it will establish a national system for consistently identifying consumers and healthcare providers.

Cracking the cancer code: How a revolution in DNA sequencing is transforming our understanding of cancer

Cancer is a disease where the cellular software code – the genome – is corrupted. The code can be corrupted by deletion of large segments of DNA, point mutation, amplification, or chemical (epigenetic) modification. Identifying the spectrum of genetic changes in a cancer cell and understanding how they interact has been a major focus of cancer research for over thirty years.
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Australian Bionic Eye in view

The development of a locally developed bionic eye is a step closer to becoming a reality as a result of Australian Government funding announced this week.

Bionic Vision Australia will receive $42 Million over four years for the development of this life-changing technology. The consortium members are the University of Melbourne, the Bionic Ear Institute, NICTA, the Centre for Eye Research Australia and the University of New South Wales. Bionic Vision Australia Chairman, Professor Emeritus David Penington AC says the consortium is honoured to have been selected by the Australian Research Council for this funding.

Brain modelling and brain-inspired computing

Professor Anders Lansner, Stockholm Brain Institute

There are many synergies between the fields of information science and technology and that of brain and neuroscience. Advanced software tools as well as equipment heavy in informatics are employed extensively in brain research. One set of tools allow us to model the brain and perform multi-scale simulations on high performance computers. Such simulations enable understanding of psychological phenomena in terms of mechanisms at the neuronal level which will be useful, for example, in the design of new drugs.

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