Towards human-human-computer interaction for
biologically-inspired problem-solving in human
genetics
GECCO '07: Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on
Genetic and evolutionary computation, 1, page 432--433. London, ACM Press, (7-11 July 2007)Abstract
Genetic programming (GP) shows great promise for
solving complex problems in human genetics.
Unfortunately, many of these methods are not accessible
to biologists. This is partly due to the complexity of
the algorithms that limit their ready adoption and
integration into an analysis or modelling paradigm that
might otherwise only use univariate statistical
methods. This is also partly due to the lack of
user-friendly, open-source, platform independent, and
freely-available software packages that are designed to
be used by biologists for routine analysis. It is our
objective to develop, distribute and support a
comprehensive software package that puts powerful GP
methods for genetic analysis in the hands of
geneticists. It is our working hypothesis that the most
effective use of such a software package would result
from interactive analysis by both a biologist and a
computer scientist (i.e. human-human-computer
interaction). We summarise briefly here the design and
implementation of an open-source software package
called Symbolic Modeler (SyMod) that seeks to
facilitate geneticist-bioinformaticist-computer
interactions for problem solving in human genetics.
More information can be found at www.epistasis.org or
www.symbolicmodeler.org.
