The National Institutes of Health is looking for a Bioinformatics Postdoc in Bethesda, MD. The post states, “The Bioinformatics Programmer/Developer/Coder applicant’s Ph.D. degree must be in computer science or mathematics from an accredited university with 3-5 years Post-Doctorial experience in Bioinformatics, Semantic Web and RDF/XML to serialize RDF and OWL ontologies utilizing a primary computer language such as C, C++, C#, Java, Lisp, Python etc. Responsibilities include the development of middle ware for various high-throughput omics data QC analytics, and creating analytical applications that union and intersect geocoding (ArcGIS), omics data, electronic medical records and other clinical data with analytical applications such as R, Bioconductor, MATLAB, and SAS.” Read more

Allegient is pleased to announce a key milestone in the development of its Big Data analytics practice. Developers from Allegient and IUPUI’s School of Informatics have created SURAAK (Semantic Understanding Research in the Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge). SURAAK was developed through an $844k grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging to help caregivers of geriatric patients easily find health care solutions, increase the speed of doing research, and increase confidence in their analysis. Read more

The National Institutes of Health is looking for a Bioinformatics Programmer in Bethesda, MD. The post states, “The Bioinformatics Programmer/Developer/Coder applicant’s Ph.D. degree must be in computer science or mathematics from an accredited university with 3-5 years Post-Doctorial experience in Bioinformatics, Semantic Web and RDF/XML to serialize RDF and OWL ontologies utilizing a primary computer language such as C, C++, C#, Java, Lisp, Python etc. Responsibilities include the development of middle ware for various high-throughput omics data QC analytics, and creating analytical applications that union and intersect geocoding (ArcGIS), omics data, electronic medical records and other clinical data with analytical applications such as R, Bioconductor, MATLAB, and SAS.” Read more

The National Institutes of Health is looking for a Post Doc candidate in Bioinformatics in Bethesda, MD. The post states, “The Bioinformatics Programmer/Developer/Coder applicant’s Ph.D. degree must be in computer science or mathematics from an accredited university with 3-5 years Post-Doctorial experience in Bioinformatics, Semantic Web and RDF/XML to serialize RDF and OWL ontologies utilizing a primary computer language such as C, C++, C#, Java, Lisp, Python etc. Responsibilities include the development of middle ware for various high-throughput omics data QC analytics, and creating analytical applications that union and intersect geocoding (ArcGIS), omics data, electronic medical records and other clinical data with analytical applications such as R, Bioconductor, MATLAB, and SAS.” Read more

VIVO, a semantic information representation system that enables collaboration among scientists across all disciplines, has had a busy summer: The open source project to facilitate the advancement of research and discovery by integrating information about scholars, their activities, and outputs, gained a more permanent home in the DuraSpace Incubator, ensuring a way to continue activities after its NIH grant continuation year ran out. It saw the publication of VIVO: A Semantic Approach to Scholarly Networking and Discovery. And Northwestern University brought its researchers together in a single hub called Northwestern Scholars, an implementation of Elsevier’s SciVal Experts research networking tool (see our story here).

The future is looking pretty bright, too. “We are very interested in funding, research resources, scholarly works, scholars and data sets,” says Mike Conlon, primary investigator of the VIVO project. “As the world moves forward, these things are all inter-related, but that’s been very blurry, especially to organizations and institutions.” Funding agencies, for example, want to know what work was produced as a result of its grants to a major center. It no longer is just a question of who wrote a paper, but who funded it, what tools were behind it, and how was the data produced, and how all these things inter-relate in a scholarly data system.

“Connecting these things becomes the work of the future,” says Conlon.

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There’s been a lot of attention given to the issue of prescription drug abuse, in the wake of violent crimes such as one last year that left four people dead in a pharmacy shooting in Suffolk County, New York. A recent study from the Workers Compensation Research Institute also shows that prescription drug abuse is the fastest growing drug problem in the United States, with over fifteen thousand people dying last year from an overdose. And, the U.S. Senate in late May approved an amendment to reclassify drugs that contain hydrocodone, a highly-addictive substance found in Vicodin and Lortabas, among other drugs, as Schedule II substances, while giving law enforcement more tools to monitor distribution of such drugs and also decreasing access to them for non-medical purposes.

What, you may ask, does any of this have to do with semantic technologies? Dr. Amit P. Sheth, Wright State University Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, and Dr. Raminta Daniulaityte of the school’s Center for Interventions, Treatment and Addictions Research (CITAR), have a ready answer : PREDOSE, an application for understanding pain-killer drug abuse through the semantic analysis of social media conversations. More specifically, it’s automated data collection and analysis tools to process web-based data to determine the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of addicts, related to buprenorphine, OxyContin and other pharmaceutical opioids. It’s a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project created by a partnership between Kno.e.sis and the CITAR.

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WebLib LLC has released NLMplus, “a semantic search and knowledge discovery application that utilizes a variety of semantic resources and natural language processing tools to produce improved search results from the vast collection of biomedical data and services of the National Library of Medicine (NLM).”

According to the article, “The NLMplus app combines a number of leading-edge semantic knowledge resources and technologies, such as a biomedical knowledge base, a semantic search engine, a distributed search engine, and a variety of smart content analysis and discovery services. Read more

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) seek a Supervisory Information Technology Specialist in Montgomery County, MD. According to the post, “The NIH’s Office of the Chief Information Office, Information Technology Architecture Office (ITAO) is seeking a Director and NIH Enterprise Architect to provide expert leadership for planning, developing, and overseeing NIH Enterprise Architecture (EA) activities and transforming technologies for NIH such as Federal Public Key Infrastructure, Service Oriented Architecture, implementation of Business Process Management Software, and Enterprise Identity Management Infrastructure.” Read more