A feel-good atmosphere was in the room yesterday at the inaugural symposium for Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing. It’s one of Harvard’s several new interdisciplinary research programs that aim to bring together people from the university’s different schools, campuses and hospitals to collaborate more.
I was struck by the warm-and-fuzzy, collaborative mood. One speaker said he felt like the meeting would end in a group hug. The overall theme: scientists from many disciplines now get to play with some advanced instruments (from telescopes to MRI scanners) that collect way more data than they know what to do with. So they’re calling in the computer scientists to help them come with new tools to analyze, visualize and store terabytes worth of information.
Time will tell whether bringing computer scientists and scientists from other fields like astronomy, physics and medicine will yield high-impact research results. But they seem to be off to an enthusiastic start. Speakers presented some intriguing projects:
- Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and medical imaging experts from Brigham and Women’s hospital got together to adapt software originally developed to visualize data from, say, MRI scans, for use on astronomy data.
- Harvard neuroscientists are working with computer scientists to build the connectome, a visual map of the wiring between brain and nervous system cells
- And probably the most jaw-dropping presentation of the day: sophisticated animations of biological processes inside the cell. Later this spring, Harvard will release the final versions of these multimedia representations for use in Harvard undergraduate classes.
I just took a look at the site you link to—what a lovely introductory video there about the molecular-level processes inside the cell. I had one concern (which I’m sure they’re going to address) is that all the processes and assembly look very deliberate and very “clean” when we know they’re stochastic. Even something as simple as molecular interactions are not always a perfect “on” and “off” reaction. I’m sure the Harvard instructors will let students know this is an idealized and artificial representation of real processes going on in cells. I wouldn’t put such a point on it, but the stochastic picture is very important when one is thinking of thermodynamics and probability at the molecular level.
Yes, there certainly was some debate in the Q&A session about how these videos should be used and interpreted. There was concern that students wouldn’t bother reading the textbook if they’re so taken by the slick videos (ie. why read the book when you can watch the movie? And we all know how different the movie can be from the book!). The leader behind the multimedia project, Harvard’s Robert Lue, said that the animations should never stand alone, but be presented alongside other materials that make clear that these are just representations, not simulations.