Tomorrow (ie., Feb. 4th 2009), Bay Area user group is going to host a talk by Karim Chine, author of Biocep platform. As a strong advocate of Cloud Computing for scientific research purposes, I find this project interesting. I am in touch with Karim and I will be doing a post in this space sometime this month (after I have a session with him). He is going to talk about his project at Bay Area User Group meeting tomorrow. You can find information about the meeting here. Since I am interested in his work and have plans to write about the project in this space in the future, I thought I will give a shoutout here. If you are interested in Cloud Computing and Scientific research, I suggest you talk to him about the project, in particular, and the use of Cloud Computing, in general.

When you are on this topic, I also recommend the recent New York Times article on the power of R language. It is a good article deserving a shout out here.

R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.

I am interested in R because it is an opensource software and it is very useful in the field of scientific research. In fact, its vast collection of reusable packages proves to be a big asset.

Anyway, check out Karim’s talk if your interests are in tune with this. I expect to talk to him soon and come up with a post in this space.