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1. Accelerating complex modeling workflows in CyberWater using on-demand HPC/Cloud resources

   https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience51609.2021.00030  

   Li, Feng; Chen, Ranran; Fu, Yuankun; Song, Fengguang; Liang, Yao; Ranawaka, Isuru; Pamidighantam, Sudhakar; Luna, Daniel; Liang, Xu (September 2021, The 17th IEEE International Conference on eScience)

   Workflow management systems (WMSs) are commonly used to organize/automate sequences of tasks as workflows to accelerate scientific discoveries. During complex workflow modeling, a local interactive workflow environment is desirable, as users usually rely on their rich, local environments for fast prototyping and refinements before they consider using more powerful computing resources. However, existing WMSs do not simultaneously support local interactive workflow environments and HPC resources. In this paper, we present an on-demand access mechanism to remote HPC resources from desktop/laptopbased workflow management software to compose, monitor and analyze scientific workflows in the CyberWater project. Cyber- Water is an open-data and open-modeling software framework for environmental and water communities. In this work, we extend the open-model, open-data design of CyberWater with on-demand HPC accessing capacity. In particular, we design and implement the LaunchAgent library, which can be integrated into the local desktop environment to allow on-demand usage of remote resources for hydrology-related workflows. LaunchAgent manages authentication to remote resources, prepares the computationally-intensive or data-intensive tasks as batch jobs, submits jobs to remote resources, and monitors the quality of services for the users. LaunchAgent interacts seamlessly with other existing components in CyberWater, which is now able to provide advantages of both feature-rich desktop software experience and increased computation power through on-demand HPC/Cloud usage. In our evaluations, we demonstrate how a hydrology workflow that consists of both local and remote tasks can be constructed and show that the added on-demand HPC/Cloud usage helps speeding up hydrology workflows while allowing intuitive workflow configurations and execution using a desktop graphical user interface. 

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2. Software and Data Resources to Advance Machine Learning Research in Electroencephalography

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SPMB47826.2019.9037851  

   Rahman, S.; Miranda, M.; Obeid, I.; Picone, J. (December 2019, IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium (SPMB))

   Obeid, I.; Selesnick, I. (Ed.)

   The Neural Engineering Data Consortium at Temple University has been providing key data resources to support the development of deep learning technology for electroencephalography (EEG) applications [1-4] since 2012. We currently have over 1,700 subscribers to our resources and have been providing data, software and documentation from our web site [5] since 2012. In this poster, we introduce additions to our resources that have been developed within the past year to facilitate software development and big data machine learning research. Major resources released in 2019 include: ● Data: The most current release of our open source EEG data is v1.2.0 of TUH EEG and includes the addition of 3,874 sessions and 1,960 patients from mid-2015 through 2016. ● Software: We have recently released a package, PyStream, that demonstrates how to correctly read an EDF file and access samples of the signal. This software demonstrates how to properly decode channels based on their labels and how to implement montages. Most existing open source packages to read EDF files do not directly address the problem of channel labels [6]. ● Documentation: We have released two documents that describe our file formats and data representations: (1) electrodes and channels [6]: describes how to map channel labels to physical locations of the electrodes, and includes a description of every channel label appearing in the corpus; (2) annotation standards [7]: describes our annotation file format and how to decode the data structures used to represent the annotations. Additional significant updates to our resources include: ● NEDC TUH EEG Seizure (v1.6.0): This release includes the expansion of the training dataset from 4,597 files to 4,702. Calibration sequences have been manually annotated and added to our existing documentation. Numerous corrections were made to existing annotations based on user feedback. ● IBM TUSZ Pre-Processed Data (v1.0.0): A preprocessed version of the TUH Seizure Detection Corpus using two methods [8], both of which use an FFT sliding window approach (STFT). In the first method, FFT log magnitudes are used. In the second method, the FFT values are normalized across frequency buckets and correlation coefficients are calculated. The eigenvalues are calculated from this correlation matrix. The eigenvalues and correlation matrix's upper triangle are used to generate feature. ● NEDC TUH EEG Artifact Corpus (v1.0.0): This corpus was developed to support modeling of non-seizure signals for problems such as seizure detection. We have been using the data to build better background models. Five artifact events have been labeled: (1) eye movements (EYEM), (2) chewing (CHEW), (3) shivering (SHIV), (4) electrode pop, electrostatic artifacts, and lead artifacts (ELPP), and (5) muscle artifacts (MUSC). The data is cross-referenced to TUH EEG v1.1.0 so you can match patient numbers, sessions, etc. ● NEDC Eval EEG (v1.3.0): In this release of our standardized scoring software, the False Positive Rate (FPR) definition of the Time-Aligned Event Scoring (TAES) metric has been updated [9]. The standard definition is the number of false positives divided by the number of false positives plus the number of true negatives: #FP / (#FP + #TN). We also recently introduced the ability to download our data from an anonymous rsync server. The rsync command [10] effectively synchronizes both a remote directory and a local directory and copies the selected folder from the server to the desktop. It is available as part of most, if not all, Linux and Mac distributions (unfortunately, there is not an acceptable port of this command for Windows). To use the rsync command to download the content from our website, both a username and password are needed. An automated registration process on our website grants both. An example of a typical rsync command to access our data on our website is: rsync -auxv nedc_tuh_eeg@www.isip.piconepress.com:~/data/tuh_eeg/ Rsync is a more robust option for downloading data. We have also experimented with Google Drive and Dropbox, but these types of technology are not suitable for such large amounts of data. All of the resources described in this poster are open source and freely available at https://www.isip.piconepress.com/projects/tuh_eeg/downloads/. We will demonstrate how to access and utilize these resources during the poster presentation and collect community feedback on the most needed additions to enable significant advances in machine learning performance. 

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3. MorphoCloud: Democratizing Access to High-Performance Computing for Morphological Data Analysis

   https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.176328.1  

   Maga, A Murat; Fillion-Robin, Jean-Christophe (January 2026, F1000Research)

   Background The digitization of biological specimens has revolutionized morphology, generating massive 3D datasets such as microCT scans. While open-source platforms like 3D Slicer and SlicerMorph have democratized access to advanced visualization and analysis software, a significant “compute gap” persists. Processing high-resolution 3D data requires high-end GPUs and substantial RAM, resources that are frequently unavailable at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) and other educational settings. This “digital divide” prevents many researchers and students from utilizing the very data and software that have been made open to them. Methods We present MorphoCloud, a platform designed to bridge this hardware barrier by providing on-demand, research-grade computing environments via a web browser. MorphoCloud utilizes an “IssuesOps” architecture, where users manage their remote workstations entirely through GitHub Issues using natural-language commands (e.g., /create, /unshelve). The technology stack leverages GitHub Issues and Actions for front-end and orchestration respectively, JetStream2 for backend compute, and Apache Guacamole to deliver a high-performance, GPU-accelerated desktop experience to any modern browser. Results The platform enables a streamlined lifecycle for remote instances, which come pre-configured with the SlicerMorph ecosystem, R/RStudio, and AI-assisted segmentation tools like NNInteractive and MEMOs. Users have access to a persistent storage volume that is decoupled from the instance. For educational purposes, MorphoCloud supports “Workshop” instances that allow for bulk provisioning and stay online continuously for short-term events. This identical environment ensures that instructors can conduct complex 3D workflows without the typical troubleshooting delays caused by heterogeneous student hardware. Conclusion MorphoCloud demonstrates that true scientific accessibility requires not just open data and software, but also open infrastructure. By abstracting the complexities of cloud administration into a simple, command-driven interface, MorphoCloud empowers researchers at under-resourced institutions to engage in high-performance morphological analysis and AI-assisted segmentation. 

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4. Moving Just Enough Deep Sequencing Data to Get the Job Done

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1177932219856359  

   Mills, Nicholas; Bensman, Ethan M; Poehlman, William L; Ligon, Walter B; Feltus, F Alex (January 2019, Bioinformatics and Biology Insights)

   Motivation: As the size of high-throughput DNA sequence datasets continues to grow, the cost of transferring and storing the datasets may prevent their processing in all but the largest data centers or commercial cloud providers. To lower this cost, it should be possible to process only a subset of the original data while still preserving the biological information of interest. Results: Using 4 high-throughput DNA sequence datasets of differing sequencing depth from 2 species as use cases, we demonstrate the effect of processing partial datasets on the number of detected RNA transcripts using an RNA-Seq workflow. We used transcript detection to decide on a cutoff point. We then physically transferred the minimal partial dataset and compared with the transfer of the full dataset, which showed a reduction of approximately 25% in the total transfer time. These results suggest that as sequencing datasets get larger, one way to speed up analysis is to simply transfer the minimal amount of data that still sufficiently detects biological signal. Availability: All results were generated using public datasets from NCBI and publicly available open source software. 

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5. Build a better bootstrap and the RAWR shall beat a random path to your door: phylogenetic support estimation revisited

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab263  

   Wang, Wei; Hejasebazzi, Ahmad; Zheng, Julia; Liu, Kevin J (July 2021, Bioinformatics)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Motivation The standard bootstrap method is used throughout science and engineering to perform general-purpose non-parametric resampling and re-estimation. Among the most widely cited and widely used such applications is the phylogenetic bootstrap method, which Felsenstein proposed in 1985 as a means to place statistical confidence intervals on an estimated phylogeny (or estimate ‘phylogenetic support’). A key simplifying assumption of the bootstrap method is that input data are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). However, the i.i.d. assumption is an over-simplification for biomolecular sequence analysis, as Felsenstein noted. Results In this study, we introduce a new sequence-aware non-parametric resampling technique, which we refer to as RAWR (‘RAndom Walk Resampling’). RAWR consists of random walks that synthesize and extend the standard bootstrap method and the ‘mirrored inputs’ idea of Landan and Graur. We apply RAWR to the task of phylogenetic support estimation. RAWR’s performance is compared to the state-of-the-art using synthetic and empirical data that span a range of dataset sizes and evolutionary divergence. We show that RAWR support estimates offer comparable or typically superior type I and type II error compared to phylogenetic bootstrap support. We also conduct a re-analysis of large-scale genomic sequence data from a recent study of Darwin’s finches. Our findings clarify phylogenetic uncertainty in a charismatic clade that serves as an important model for complex adaptive evolution. Availability and implementation Data and software are publicly available under open-source software and open data licenses at: https://gitlab.msu.edu/liulab/RAWR-study-datasets-and-scripts. 

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