Information Technology in the Natural Sciences

Biology – Chemistry – Physics

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Historical Perspective

Information Technology in Business

• Starting in the 60’s• VisiCalc 1979 first commercial

Spreadsheet program• Business applications have

been the driving force behind the rapid development of IT over the last 30 years.

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Huge Amounts of InformationBusiness Information• Wall Street produces Terabytes of

data every day• Wal-Mart Alone has an operational

database with many Terabytes of data

Scientific Information• From Stars in the Universe• Amino Acids in our bodies• Scientific Data about the Natural

World is far larger than any Business Application could produce.

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Computational Science

• Use of techniques from applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, and computer science to solve scientific problems.– Computational Biology

(Bioinformatics)– Computational Chemistry– Computational Physics– Computer Modeling and

Simulation of the Natural World

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Bioinformatics

Major research efforts in the field include

• sequence alignment, • gene finding, • protein structure alignment, • protein structure prediction,• prediction of gene expression• protein-protein interactions, and• the modeling of evolution.

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Bioinformatics continued...

• Computers were used out of necessity because

• In the Human Genome Project there is too much data to process manually

• Data Mining techniques can discover patterns and relationships that human couldn’t find.

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Computational Chemistry

• create efficient mathematical approximations and computer programs that calculate the

• properties of molecules and • to apply these programs to

concrete chemical objects. • Heavy use of Visualization,

3D Modeling and even Virtual Reality.

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Computational Physics

• study and implementation of numerical algorithms in order to solve problems in physics

• In the past, computers weren’t powerful enough to complete the computation of serious problems.

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How will this change the world?

• It already has...• The human genome could

never have been sequences without the aid of Information Technology.

• But, this is just the beginning...

• The Pharmaceutical Industry is changing rapidly.

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Drug Discovery

• The process by which drugs are designed and discovered is changing.

• Diseases can be pin pointed to certain genes and/or proteins.

• Instead of serendipitous discovery, drugs can betailor designed to repair or correct specific problems on a molecular level.

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Scary or Hopeful Considerations

• The wide use a Information Technology in Science is rather new.

• Its just about to explode.• Scientists may not be leveraging

the full advantages of IT.• The tools for manipulating data

advance much more rapidly than physical tools (instruments, etc.)