The Use of Reconfigurable Logic for Statistical Inference in Biology

• Activity Number: 213
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: IMS
• Author(s): Wing Hung Wong*+
• Companies: Stanford University
• Keywords: reconfigurable computing ; statistical inference

Abstract

Advances in biotechnology and information technology have given us the ability to determine the complete genetic makeup of an individual, to monitor the activities of many genes and proteins simultaneously, to create and maintain individual health records and to archive large collections of molecular/cellular level data sets. These developments led to many new challenges for statistics. Some of the challenges, such as the inference on causal network structures and the search for gene-gene interactions that impact disease risks, require computational power beyond current approaches based on clusters of CPUs. I will review how an alternative approach, where computation is distributed spatially through reconfigurable hardware, may be exploited to meet these new challenges.