Scientific Database Research

• Molecular Biology: In molecular biology, I worked closely with Prof. Carlis and Dr. Retzel and Ph.D. students Paul Bieganski and Ed Chi. We worked on databases to support the processing, storage, analysis, and presentation requirements of an EST sequencing project for Arabidopsis thaliana. Paul Bieganski explored data structures for representing the sequence data for efficient searches. His research showed fundamental limits on the performance of the search data structures as a function of the amount of information in each piece of data, and demonstrated experimentally that those limits were predictive for real sequence data.
• Scientific Visualization: With Ed Chi I worked on visualization of scientific data. We developed novel visualizations that show unique aspects of search results for molecular biology. We expanded this research to operator interaction frameworks for manipulating the visualizations in spreadsheet-like presentations, which we have patented. We also developed an environment for steering the computations required by the visualization based on the interaction needs of the user.
• Neurobiology:Mark Claypool and I applied our multimedia research methodology to theproblem of navigating in a three-dimensional neuroscience visualization environment. We were able to show processor and CPU performance requirements for a variety of different interaction approaches.

On to high performance parallel hardware