Computers May Be As Good As (Or Better Than) Human Biocurators

Shipud writes "Sequencing the genome of an organism is not the end of a discovery process; rather, it is a beginning. It's the equivalent of discovering a book whose words (genes) are there, but their meaning is yet unknown. Biocurators are the people who annotate genes — find out what they do — through literature search and the supervised use of computational techniques. A recent study published in PLoS Computational Biology shows that biocurators probably perform no better than fully automated computational methods used to annotate genes. It is not clear whether this is because the software is of high quality, or both curators and software need to improve their performance. The author of this blog post uses the concept of the uncanny valley to explain this recent discovery and what it means to both life science and artificial intelligence."

Re:"biocurators"?

[PopeRatzo]

It is good that you have those papers. Since you have yet to demonstrate that you can effectively use the English language for communication.

Brother, I am to the written word what Picasso was to painting, what Robert Mapplethorpe was to photography, and what Rahsaan Roland Kirk was to the saxophone.

You won't understand how great I am until somebody else tells you. Or, until I die, which could be any minute now with this goddamn heat here in Chicago.

Now I'm going to go out back and take a soak in the kiddie pool. While I'm out there, I want you to think about what I've said. Later, you can explain it to me. because I don't have a clue. These strawberry daiquiris hit like a jackhammer on a hot day like this one.