omation mbers - Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening

10:30 am Thursday, February 5 Emerging Technologies – IT Informatics Room A3
Larry Arnstein
Teranode Corporation
2815 Eastlake Avenue E.
Seattle, Washington 98102
larrya@teranode.com
Design Tools: A New Approach to Computing in Life Sciences
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Co-Author(s)
Zheng Li
Neil Fanger
Research and development in life sciences must scale beyond the ability for one group, division, or even company
to own all of the required scientific, laboratory, and information technology resources. Instead, new languages
and tools are needed that allow individuals and groups to make specific contributions in the context of a large
scale effort within or across enterprises. These new languages and tools must have broad applicability to foster
heavy re-use of IT investment; and they must incorporate conceptual models and physical form factors that are
appropriate for classically trained scientists and technicians. Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing is a branch
of computer science that aims to remove barriers, both physical and intellectual, to effective use of computing
technology. On the strength of two technologies conceived at the University of Washington, Teranode Corporation
has created a new category of software called “Design Tools for Life Sciences”. This technology integrates
modeling of complex biological systems with design, execution, and documentation of laboratory procedures
using a straight-forward graphical language that is backed by a pervasive computing infrastructure. Individuals can
now communicate about outcomes and predictions with little to no extra effort, and IT professionals can create a
wide variety of specific applications at low cost with a high degree of interoperability.
11:00 am Thursday, February 5 Emerging Technologies – IT Informatics Room A3
Eric Jones
Enthought, Inc.
515 Congress Avenue
Austin, Texas 78701
eric@enthought.com
Python for Scientific Computing – An Open Source Solution
Python is a well-designed general purpose programming language used in a variety of domains from powering
web-sites (Google, Bank of America, NATO, and many others) to processing the data and images from the Hubble
Telescope (STScI). Python has emerged as an excellent choice for scientific computing because of its simple
syntax, ease of use, and elegant multi-dimensional array arithmetic. Python’s interpreted evaluation allows it to
serve both as the development language and the command line environment in which to explore data. Python also
excels as a “glue” language that joins multiple legacy codes written in different languages together – a common
need in the scientific arena. This talk provides an overview of Python and reviews the wealth scientific tools
available and how they pertain to laboratory automation. Some of the tools discussed include:
• Numeric – Support for array (vectorized) arithmetic.
• SciPy – Scientific Algorithms including Linear Algebra, signal processing, etc.
• Chaco – Cross-platform plotting and visualization tools.
Python and these associated tools share the same Open Source development model that has propelled the Linux
operating system to notoriety. We will briefly discuss how open source methodologies can be used across an
industry or within a company to create lower cost, quality software.
PODIUM ABSTRACTS