Randal Burns
Keynote lecture
Will talk about: Data-intensive computing for neuroscience: The open connectome project
Randal Burns is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a co-founder, chief architect, and the lead developer of the Open Connectome Project. His research for the last decade has centered on high-performance computing for scientific applications, specifically spatial data organization, batch query processing, and parallel data architectures. He has only recently discovered that neuroscience has the coolest data; he is a first time NIH Principal Investigator as of 2012.
High-throughput imaging has created a “Big Data” crisis in neuroscience in which the size and complexity of data exceed the capability of labs to manage it. The Open Connectome Project stores massive imaging data on data-intensive clusters and provides Web services that can be used to extract, store, and analyze neural structure. As a platform for public data, the Open Connectome Project democratizes access to world-class imaging, making data available to researchers in statistics, machine learning, and computer vision. This talk will describe how data-intensive computing is transforming Open (Neuro)-Science. It will cover the hardware and software architecture of the services, including spatial queries, data representations and placement, and integration with parallel computing.
