Life imitates... life?
Something to get fascinated by:
Wired News: Genome Model Applied to Software.
Beddoe isn't the only one in the computer security world casting an envious eye over the bioinformatics sector's research. Dan Kaminsky, senior security consultant for Avaya, said he has been investigating using genomic pattern analysis for identifying and clustering "mutant" machines on a corporate network: PCs whose variation from the company's standard installation might make them vulnerable to compromise.
Kaminsky thinks this is only the beginning for the spread of bioinformatics ideas into other fields.
"Generating an ordered, hierarchal breakdown of interrelationships from huge piles of information is a problem that crops up everywhere. I'm not surprised to see bioinformatics solutions finally being applied to the rest of our poorly understood, oversized networks."
On the biology end, Terry Gaasterland, associate professor of computational genomics at Rockefeller University, agrees that there's a wide field of uses for the algorithms her discipline has developed -- and tricks to be learned by biologists from other fields, too.
"The problem of decoding the language of networks and the problem of finding signals in DNA are really two related instances of machine learning problems. We're almost bound to discover universal principles of information communication by investigating both," she said.
* Ray, 10/04/2004 04:56:07 PM
