Computing for biologists: Lessons from some successful case studies

My presentation will be online at the address http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/ shasha/papers/sigmodtut05.ppt in addition to at the SIGMOD site. The presentation discusses computational techniques that have helped biologists, including combinatorial design to support a disciplined experimental design, visualization techniques to display the interaction among multiple inputs, and the discovery of gene function through the search through related species, and others. In this writeup, I confine myself to informal remarks describing both social and technical lessons I have learned while working with biologists, I intersperse these comments with references to relevant papers when appropriate. The tutorial is meant to appeal to researchers and practitioners in databases, data mining, and combinatorial algorithms as well as to natural scientists, especially biologists.