Behind the Curtain at TCG

NIH Awards NITRC Phase II Contract to TCG

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded TCG a four-year contract to continue its support of the award winning Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC), a user-friendly collaboration environment for the neuroinformatics community. This support will allow NIH to enhance and expand NITRC’s scientific scope and add new types of resources. To read the full press release, click here.

NITRC Now Acccepting Externally-Issued Identity Credentials in Advance of Government Directive

NITRC--the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse--recently promoted code to allow for externally-issued identity credentials one week before Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel instructed federal agency CIOs to begin accepting non-government, externally-issued identity credentials. The ability to link a Google ID account to a NITRC log-in was included in TCG's September 2011 release. TCG built and operates NITRC for NIH. Under this contract, TCG established a web-based clearinghouse for neuroimaging analysis tools, vocabularies, datasets, and databases to facilitate the dissemination of these resources and the discussion of needs and limitations. The site provides opportunities for community comment on neuroimaging informatics knowledge resources to guide development and enhance their use by the research community. The NITRC initiative also offers a framework for other scientific areas: tools and resources created under Federal grants for scientific research in any specialty can be shared with scientific communities using the NITRC approach. For more details on NITRC, see our case study on TCG's web site.

FDP Fall General Meeting Registration Now Open

The Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), which is an association of federal agencies, academic research institutions, and research policy organizations that works to streamline the administration of federally sponsored research has announced that registration for the FDP Fall General Meeting, September 14-16, 2011 is now open and will close Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 5:00pm. It will reopen on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 3:00pm for on-site registration with the higher onsite registration fees.  Please click here to register for the meeting. For any questions regarding online registration, please contact Claudette Baylor-Fleming at cbaylor@nas.edu or at (202) 334-3994. Please click on the follow links for frequently asked questions:  General FDP FAQ or Mentoring Program FAQ.

FDP Posts Draft Agenda for September Meeting

The Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), which is an association of federal agencies, academic research institutions, and research policy organizations that works to streamline the administration of federally sponsored research, has posted a draft agenda for the FDP's September 2011 meeting on the FDP website. The agenda can be found on the homepage under Announcements, and under the MEETINGS navigation link on the left of the homepage. The meeting will be held on September 14-16, 2011, at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill. All FDP meetings are open to the public. For registration information, please refer to the meeting information on the FDP website.
 
For more information or questions, please contact David Wright @ dwright@nas.edu.

NIH BCIG Announces Fall 2011 Program

The NIH Biomedical Computing Interest Group (BCIG) has announced its Fall 2011 Program. All sessions are free and open to the public. For more information visit the BCIG home page.

Fall 2011 Program

• Sep  1:    BCIG Brainstorming Power Breakfast (unstructured dialogue on biomedical computing topics of interest to participants)
• Sep  8:    BCIG Lecture entitled “The Logic of Chance: The Nature & Origin of Biological  Evolution,” given by Eugene V. Koonin, PhD, NCBI
• Sep 22:   BCIG Book Club Meeting on “The Checklist Manifesto – How to Get Things Right,” by Atul Gawande
• Oct 6:     BCIG Brainstorming Power Breakfast (unstructured dialogue on biomedical computing topics of interest to participants)
• Oct 13:   BCIG Brainstorming Session on “How Can Computer Science & Informatics Support Clinical Applications of Mass Spectrometry?” 
• Oct 27:   BCIG Book Club Meeting on Oct 27* The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine & Science,” by R. Douglas Fields (author will be present at this meeting)
• Nov 3:    BCIG Brainstorming Power Breakfast (unstructured dialogue on biomedical computing topics of interest to participants)
• Nov 10:  BCIG Speaker Event (speaker needed; please make a suggestion)
• Nov 17:  BCIG Brainstorming Session on “Prospective Design of Clinical Research Protocols with Comparative Effectiveness & Patient Centered Outcomes in Mind”
• Dec  1:   BCIG Brainstorming Power Breakfast (unstructured dialogue on biomedical computing topics of interest to participants)

Announcements for individual events including time and location will be sent out just before each event. For additional information please contact Jim DeLeo (jdeleo@nih.gov; 301-496-3848).

Test in Peoria, Test in Düsseldorf , Test in 東京

Have you ever had someone mispronounce your name?  It doesn't happen to me often because I have a simple enough name, but it does bug me when it happens.  Names don't always follow the normal pronunciation rules so it's not really the fault of the speaker.  Even so,  it doesn't leave a good impression.

A professional web site needs to "pronounce" names properly too.  Most people in the world have characters in their name that are outside the traditional English character set.    It will surely leave a bad impression on a new user should you display their name incorrectly.  If you can't do that right, what other problems might they find after investing time in your web site?  A well seasoned user with a non-English name knows that there must be a simple solution to this problem because most other sites get it right.  

When TCG developed the NITRC website we made sure that it used the Unicode character standard for our user's names and other personal information.  Since NITRC is used by neuroscience researchers from all over the world, this was extremely important to get right.  Looking through the user list, I see lots of European names with a few accented vowels.  There are also a number of middle and far Eastern names written with characters that my poor American brain can't really see correctly.  We did get a lot of help getting these names right.  The support is built into the project's database, the programming language used on the site, and the Open Source libraries that we leverage to keep costs down for our clients.

From time to time we do still run into technical challenges keeping everyone's data looking good.  Recently we integrated a new Open Source tool called XNAT into the NITRC site.  XNAT also supported Unicode characters which, of course, is great.  Unfortunately, the protocols we used to share data between the two systems corrupted names as they were loaded into the new module.  It's not that the protocols didn't support Unicode, it's just that they didn't do it automagically.

I've worked with a lot of great testers here at TCG.  If you haven't been lucky enough to see experienced test engineers in action, I'll let you in on one of their secrets:  Use crazy text everywhere you are allowed to type.  It is especially important to make sure that you test with any characters that have special meaning to the underlying technology.  Quotes, semi-colons, asterisks, question marks, and commas can wreck havoc on an otherwise solid system.  Is the site asking you to enter your age?  Try typing "';28^&*^3hjh" and see what happens.   After this experience I've learned another trick:  Whenever I'm testing, my name will be Albért.

Thankfully, our internal unit testing found this problem long before the first iteration of the site was even shown to our formal tester.  What exactly went wrong and how we got it working is the topic for another post that will be much more technical.  What is important is that I put a new tool in my testing arsenal.

NITRC Passes Milestone

NITRC--the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse--recently passed the 3,000 registered users level and now has 383 registered tools available for users. TCG built and operates NITRC for NIH. Under this contract, TCG established a web-based clearinghouse for neuroimaging analysis tools, vocabularies, datasets, and databases to facilitate the dissemination of these resources and the discussion of needs and limitations. The site provides opportunities for community comment on neuroimaging informatics knowledge resources to guide development and enhance their use by the research community. The NITRC initiative also offers a framework for other scientific areas: tools and resources created under Federal grants for scientific research in any specialty can be shared with scientific communities using the NITRC approach. For more details on NITRC, see our case study on TCG's web site.

NIH Awards First-Time Grant to Long-Time Grants Management Experts

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded TCG a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to develop a cloud-based data sharing system for neuroscience. While TCG has helped agencies manage tens of thousands of grants for others for 17 years,this is our first Federal grant. TCG applied for and was awarded this grant in response to NIH’s call for grant applications from small businesses proposing innovative research in biomedical informatics and computational biology to promote the progress of biomedical research. Read the full press release here.

LAMHDI Exhibits at Immunology 2011

TCG's LAMHDI Team--Judith Turner, Matt Travers, and Haig Evans-Kavaldjian--manned an exhibit at Immunology 2011, the 98th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Immunologists in San Francisco, May 14th-17th. The conference, which is the largest annual immunology meeting worldwide, featured over 100 exhibitors and a scientific program with more than 550 speakers in over 100 sessions covering the latest in immunology and related fields. In addition, over 1,600 poster presenters shared their latest findings. Chris Mungall of Lawrence Berkely Labs presented the LAMHDI scientific poster. TCG built and is maintaining LAMHDI--the initiative to Link Animal Models to Human DIsease--for the National Center for Research Resources under contract number HHSN268200800014C.

LAMHDI Exhibits at Experimental Biology Conference

LAMHDI, the initiative to Link Animal Models to Human DIsease, exhibited at the recent Experimental Biology conference at the Washington Convention Center in DC. The conference attracted well over 10,000 researchers, students, exhibitors, and practitioners, many of whom visited the LAMHDI booth and attended the LAMHDI scientific poster exposition. Researchers associated with the initiative also were invited to present LAMHDI at the veterinarians' networking lunch. The conference was sponsored by six scientific societies: American Association of Anatomists (AAA); The American Physiological Society (APS); American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB); American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP); American Society for Nutrition (ASN); and the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). TCG built and is maintaining LAMHDI for the National Center for Research Resources under contract number HHSN268200800014C.