Citizens Science: Enabling Computational Probabilistic Methods for Organism's Transcriptional Regulatory Network Using Voluntary Computing Platforms

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal will be awarded using funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). With this EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) proposal, the team aims to demonstrate that BOINC can be an efficient platform for a wide class of applications employing a probabilistic inference based on Gibbs sampling. Specifically, the team expects to (i ) provide an architecture by which Gibbs sampling applications can exploitBOINC and (ii ) take advantage of the Gibbs sampling interface for BOINC by converting the Phylogenetic Gibbs Centroid Sampler, the most powerful version of a 16-year-established molecular biology algorithm that yet needs a boost to solve gene regulatory problems with genome-scale sequence data sets.