The Universe is in us!

I have been away from this blog for a while, and there are a number of reasons for that. Mostly I have been really really lazy with lots of work and sleep. The good news is that I am back and I have quite a few things to post about.

While reading this, you might be wondering what this post is about? Well its about surprising similarities between two totally different worlds. The first one involves the microscopic world of DNA. The data I used is specifically cancer mutated DNA I was provided when I went to a GameJam for Cancer Research UK. One of the problems we tried to address in this gamejam was to identify the regions in DNA with cancer mutations. Being a Computer Vision Engineer, I have been really interested on representing the data in a visual way. While I might not have succeeded in creating something useful, however what I found was quite interesting.

Game hackathon for Cancer Research UK

Over the weekend I was at the google campus london for the hackathon for Cancer Research UK. The objective of this hackathon was to convert dna data into an interactive and social game to help accelerate the cancer research. The data provided by Cancer Research UK had different mutations in dna, which could be identified by sudden shift in the data points. Approximately 40 developers and gamer spent 48 hours to design different games that utilized this data, had the social gaming experience and above all provided some feedback for easy identification of the dna mutations resulting in Cancer.

The outcome was a number of games with different diverse ideas, each one focusing on one thing, to analyse the data using human eye. More details on this event coming soon, as we are all waiting to hear about it from Cancer Research UK.

Report on this event can be found here: bit.ly/WsTB1B
City University Press Release on this event: http://tinyurl.com/cmxdbyc