News:Wolfram tech for bio data analysis

Question

[dk7258859]

Hi all,

I work at Wolfram Research and recently I've been asked to highlight and pull in one place all the functionality in our software that might be useful to bioscientists. We are mainly focusing on general data science, bioinformatics, analysis, presentation, i.e. things that bio people would mainly use R and Python libraries for.

Part of the motivation for this is that many universities have a full site-wide license for our software, which makes it available to all departments at no cost, but historically we have had very little exposure to fields like biosciences.

I am looking for some general feedback on https://www.wolfram.com/biosciences/ which aims to summarize how Wolfram tech can help bio research and teaching. Does the website include, at a glance, the main things you'd be interested in an R/Python alternative? Is there anything missing that you would find especially convincing? Are there any points that fall flat?

This post contains some more extended examples: https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/3394441 which hopefully show how combining the different parts of the Wolfram computational platform can be used to solve real problems.

And a flashier example: https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/3411092 :)

[GenoMax]

Part of the motivation for this is that many universities have a full site-wide license for our software

Is there a publicly available list that you could link, so people can find out if their institution has a license. A lot of times this information is hard to come by within institutions.

[dk7258859]

We don't have a public list but we have an easy way to check if your institution has one: https://www.wolfram.com/siteinfo/ with your academic/institution email.

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

When I look at the page, https://www.wolfram.com/biosciences/ I think it takes too long to show what kind of analyses are supported.

Biology is extraordinarily broad, and the page starts by talking too much about the first steps—for example, it talks about loading data from various formats rather than the deliverable—why would we even want to load data in the first place?

Then the page talks about user-friendly documentation, but when I reach that, I still don't know what I could do that I would need documentation for.

I have to scroll down to "free interactive courses" to finally get a glimpse of the platform's capabilities.

I would move the topics listed as titles in the "free interactive courses" to the start, mention other topics, and give people a good sense right away of what the platform can be used for.

[dk7258859]

Thank you very much for the feedback, we'll look to fix that by bringing up some concrete functionality at the forefront of the page.