"The face-to-face interaction allows for a very fast software development cycle", says Jason Stajich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley, "you can pose a problem and someone with the solution is sitting in the same room".
In addition to the programmers, a number of biologists are lending their expertise to the hackathon. "The biologists keep us honest by making sure that the code that we produce solves real problems that they care about", says Hilmar Lapp of NESCent, who organized the meeting.
The software produced will be freely available, under what is referred to as an open-source license, and it is being documented as it is being produced. "It is impressive to see this group at work, and to see how dedicated they are to making tools that are useful to, and easily used by, the larger research community", says Todd Vision, the Associate Director of Informatics at NESCent. He adds, "the participants are also identifying areas for future work, and I expect that this meeting will launch some new collaborations".
The first Phyloinformatics Hackathon is taking at place at NESCent in Durham, NC from December 11-15, 2006. NESCent (rhymes with "crescent") is an NSF funded center designed to promote synthetic research in evolutionary biology. It is a collaboration between Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University. More information about NESCent is available at www.nescent.org.
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Contact: Kristin Jenkins
kjenkins@nescent.org
919-668-4544
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)
14-Dec-2006