In this quick post, I asked ChatGPT a few things about the cloud and how it may be useful for genomics. Spoiler alert: ChatGPT seems to have read my content 😎. Its responses sound very much like the answers I would give. Query 1: What are the top three reasons the cloud should be used for genomics research? 1. Scalability: The cloud allows for the storage…

Last week, I and 15 other Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) partook in an event at Microsoft surrounding their new Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare (MC4H) platform. Since it was announced earlier this year, there have been tons of advancements in Microsoft’s healthcare offerings that cover technical needs from providers to payers…

Recently, a Shiny-based research app that I run, called StrainHub.io, went down. It was previously hosted on a free service, but it was time for me to bite the bullet and host it myself on a more performant compute environment in Microsoft Azure. I realized that while it wasn’t that…

Microsoft Dev Box is an Azure-based is a managed service that allows developers to create on-demand workstations in the cloud. They’re designed to be “ready-to-code”, high performance, and secure for your projects. …

Just as things were seeming to return to normal from the COVID-19 pandemic, reports of monkeypox started being shared around the globe. Many people were vaccinated against smallpox (the variola virus) in the 1950s-70s. So, how does monkeypox differ and why might we care about these new infections? Cowpox, monkeypox…

Deploying Databricks in Azure is easy. Deploying Databricks in a super locked-down, ‘make your security group happy’ kind of way…not as easy. In some enterprise cloud architectures, it’s a common practice to deploy many cloud services behind private endpoints and ensure that your data isn’t traveling across the public web…

You may have heard that there are a couple of new Omicron subvariants that are causing alarm: BA.2.75 and BA.5. Is this alarm just something for the media blogs to write about or do they pose some real threat? …

Your feed may have recently been flooded with cool, AI-generated images rendered from tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or other models. The concept of an AI system creating new information (rather than just interpreting it) is called “hallucination”. So, does this mean that we can cause other models like, say…

A deep-dive into building scalable architectures in Azure for bioinformatics workloads. — The following is an blog-friendly extract from my upcoming book, Genomics in the Azure Cloud. This post summarizes the overall purpose of the book, which provides design considerations for a genomics-centric architecture that harnesses the cloud’s power for organizing and scaling bioinformatics. Genomics has the power to unlock biological insights…