This is our blog series interviewing our 2018 Google Summer of Code students, who working remotely for InterMine for 3 months on on a variety of projects. We’ve interviewed Adrián Rodríguez Bazaga, who will be working on the InterMine Data Browser.
Hi Adrian! We’re really excited to have you on board as part of the team this summer. Can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I am Adrián Rodríguez Bazaga, a student from UPC, Barcelona (Spain). I am a Computer Scientist who is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Data Science and Machine Learning. One of the things that characterizes me, is my desire for science, and to solve problems using technology, and when it’s posible, do it in collaboration with other enthusiasts in the field, which is how the Open Source philosophy works!
Apart from this, I love animals, especially cats and Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, I could spend all day long cuddling them if I had the time. I also love to play chess and any kind of board games in my spare time!
What interested you about GSoC with InterMine?
As a student, I’m still learning about everything that interest me, and although my major is Computer Science (and Artificial Intelligence related topics), I’m very interested in the bioinformatics world, a landscape where InterMine lies around, and, consequently, gives me the perfect opportunity to learn the “bio-concepts” behind the project on which I am involved, by applying my Computer Science skills.
Tell us about the project you’re planning to do for InterMine this summer.
Currently, the InterMine services offer a query builder to search for biological data over the different mines. Although this is a very useful tool, the user needs to know how the data is structured (data model) on each mine, in order to create the desired queries. Since knowing the data model is mandatory to use this query builder, it can, indeed, become overwhelming for new users who want to search for some specific information in the data.
On top of this idea, my project is to implement a faceted search tool to display the data from InterMine database, allowing the users to search easily within the different mines available around InterMine, and we have already made some advancements on that, as you can check in the following picture:
Are there any challenges you anticipate for your project? How do you plan to overcome them?
The main challenge of my project lies on the fact that, the data browser is intended to be used by beginners, without the added difficulty of knowing deeply the data model, this means that I will need to deploy an application capable of working with all the functionality of searching on InterMine repositories but with an easy-to-use interface for users, which is by itself, a great challenge.
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