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Finished student projects
The list of student projects below are all finished.
Many e-Science applications are data intensive. Metadata is at the heart to serve the semantic interpretation, discovery, and integration of large-scale heterogeneous scientific data. The project explores observations of how metadata are used in a variety of e-Science disciplines, such as annotation, workflow, information integration, provenance, and curation. It aims to analyse the requirements for metadata central to e-Science applications, and examines state-of-the-art approaches.
Grid computing provides technologies for building high performance scientific and business applications. Grid applications need access to distributed and heterogeneous data sources and OGSA-DAI midd leware provides data services to access and integrate data sources. Paral lelism has been used extensively for designing efficient data and computation intensive applications. This project aims to explore paral lelism in OGSA-DAI services to achieve performance improvements for data applications designed using OGSA-DAI services.
In modern scientific researches, a lot of computer programs have been developed for scientists to do different computation or analysis on their data. And database technologies are commonly used in e-Science community to store massive mount of scientific data. But the challenge still exists.
The cystic fibrosis group in the Molecular Medicine Centre (MMC) at the Western General are developing gene gene therapies to treat cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening hereditary disease. To understand which genes are responsible for the disease, and which genes may have diagnostic or prognostic value, they go through a long process of laboratory experiments and analysis, involving microarray experiments and several types of statistical tests. Many of the laboratory experiments are currently automated, but all of the analysis and data handling steps require human interaction.
Project status:
Finished
Degree level:
MSc
Background:
This requires someone with versatile skills. You must be able to communicate
well and work closely with the users of your system at the MMC. Moreover, you
should expect messy text files and existing software, and while we expect you
to program clean web services to hide all the mess for future generations of
e-Science students.
What is cystic fibrosis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cystic_fibrosis
The group you will work in:
http://www.genetics.med.ed.ac.uk/
Tavera, a workflow tool:
http://taverna.sourceforge.net/
An important way of understanding genetic diseases in humans is to perform research on animal models, such as mice. Unfortunately, mapping genes from one species to another is not straightforward. Some data are available to map genes from one species to another, but where these data do not exist, other approaches are required. This could involve running so called blast queries to determine the most likely candidates.
Project status:
Finished
Degree level:
MSc
Background:
This requires a person that is willing to search for information on its own
and is willing to communicate with domain experts (i.e., bioinformaticians and
biologists). You will need to program the web services and deploy these in
Tomcat. Moreover, you will need to call other web services to perform the more
advanced methods of linking.
The Edinburgh Mouse Atlas (EMAGE)
http://genex.hgu.mrc.ac.uk/
The human equivalent of EMAGE, the Electronic Atlas of the Developing Human Brain:
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ihg/EADHB/
What does homology means in the context of genes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_%28biology%29#Homology_of_sequences_in_genetics
An example of a web page to search for homolog genes
http://bioinfo.cnio.es/cgi-bin/db/homologene
To patch sshfs to make it work with Grid certificates, then install it on a Linux machine and mount a directory on a machine that is part of the National Grid Service.
Project status:
Finished
Degree level:
UG4
Background:
You must like hacking Linux kernels and understand the idea behind ssh authentication, and be a proficient C programmer.
