We Should Have Built This For Them
July 16, 2008 – 2:13 pmOne Big Lab has a short review of LabMeeting.com, a tool to help PhD students organize papers they’ve read, discover new ones, share lab procedures, and so on. It was built by physics students; similar systems, like Ologeez and OpenWetWare, were built by geneticists and cell biologists respectively. I can’t help but think that we (computer scientists) should be building stuff like this for them, so that they can spend their time making tiny little black holes and intelligent viruses and stuff. It isn’t “just implementation”: there are lots of interesting problems in user interfaces, and as soon as you get into things like reproducible research there’s a ton of publishable work in requirements engineering to be done to figure out what systems ought to be doing. *sigh*
3 Responses to “We Should Have Built This For Them”
How would you know what a physicist, geneticist, or cell biologist really needed in their career?
By Titus Brown on Jul 16, 2008
If you want to give us help with scipy, a graphical IDE for it, a documentation gathering framework for all this… We need plenty of help and are spending our nights and week end doing it :).
No seriously, if you want a bunch of ideas that would be very useful for scientists and engineers, talk, say to the scipy conference organizers, they have a pretty good idea of where you guys could pitch in.
By Gael Varoquaux on Jul 16, 2008
@Titus: the same way I’d know what a mortgage broker, nurse, or taxi dispatcher needed in theirs?
By Greg Wilson on Jul 17, 2008