Keynote
Monday October 11, 2021
Dr. Nic Herndon
East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA
Data science to mitigate global warming effects
Abstract:
For most data analysis, roughly 80% of the effort is spent on data collection, formatting, and pre-processing, and 20% on analysis.
But what happens when all these steps stand in the way of focusing on the actual science? Such is the case with finding associations
between regions of DNA, different traits, and environmental factors. The genomic data (DNA) is large and either stored in specialized
databases along with the traits, or in various file formats. The environmental data is made publicly available by various websites
as large files, each containing a few variables (e.g., temperature, precipitation) for a specific region or for the whole world, with
the data using one of the hundreds of standard GIS projections. From each file though, a user needs to extract the values only for a
few geographic locations, using either proprietary software, R or Python scripts, or command line tools. And the analysis is too
complex for a laptop, or even a server, and needs to run on high performance compute cluster (HPC). The existing software makes it
virtually impossible for a biologist or ecologist to perform such an analysis. To address this, we are proposing a web application
that allows a user to select the data through an intuitive graphical user interface, to pre-process it using interactive charts, to
send it for analysis on an HPC, and to display the results back on a map.
Bio:
Dr. Nic Herndon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the East Carolina University (ECU), which he joined in August 2019.
He has a PhD degree in Computer Science (2016) from Kansas State University, a Master degree in Computer Science (2008) from the University of Nevada,
Reno, and a Bachelor degree in Computer Science (2004) from University of Nevada, Reno.
Prior to joining ECU, he was a Teaching Fellow in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Before that, Dr. Herndon was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Connecticut, in the Plant Computational Genomics Lab, a
Bioinformatics Specialist at Bioinformatics Center at Kansas State University, Programmer Analyst in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Kansas
State University, Software Engineer at International Game Technology, and System Administrator at Barnes & Noble, Inc.
His main research interests are in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics/Data Science, Computational Biology, and Bioinformatics.
