skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: PhysiCell Studio: a graphical tool to make agent-based modeling more accessible
Defining a multicellular model can be challenging. There may be hundreds of parameters that specify the attributes and behaviors of objects. In the best case, the model will be defined using some format specification – a markup language – that will provide easy model sharing (and a minimal step toward reproducibility). PhysiCell is an open-source, physics-based multicellular simulation framework with an active and growing user community. It uses XML to define a model and, traditionally, users needed to manually edit the XML to modify the model. PhysiCell Studio is a tool to make this task easier. It provides a GUI that allows editing the XML model definition, including the creation and deletion of fundamental objects: cell types and substrates in the microenvironment. It also lets users build their model by defining initial conditions and biological rules, run simulations, and view results interactively. PhysiCell Studio has evolved over multiple workshops and academic courses in recent years, which has led to many improvements. There is both a desktop and cloud version. Its design and development has benefited from an active undergraduate and graduate research program. Like PhysiCell, the Studio is open-source software and contributions from the community are encouraged.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2303695
PAR ID:
10597817
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Giga Science
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Gigabyte
Volume:
2024
ISSN:
2709-4715
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 19
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. PEARC'25 (Ed.)
    The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University has recently released two Generative AI inference tools, AnvilGPT and Purdue GenAI Studio, to the research and campus communities. These services support over 1000 users who use 10+ open-source GenAI models to aid their work. Building on HPC’s long history of using open-source tools, these services are based on customized open-source frameworks and hosted entirely on-prem. This pa- per argues that building custom GenAI services from open-source frameworks is a scalable and cost-effective solution for providing access to Generative AI models. This paper shares the methodology and resources required to develop and host these services and seeks to be a resource for other research computing centers that wish to leverage their HPC investment to create similar services. 
    more » « less
  2. While lots of research has explored howto prevent maintainers from abandoning the open-source projects that serve as our digital infrastructure, there are very few insights on addressing abandonment when it occurs. We argue open-source sustainability research must expand its focus beyond trying to keep particular projects alive, to also cover the sustainable use of open source by supporting users when they face potential or actual abandonment.We interviewed 33 developers who have experienced open-source dependency abandonment. Often, they used multiple strategies to cope with abandonment, for example, first reaching out to the community to find potential alternatives, then switching to a community-accepted alternative if one exists. We found many developers felt they had little to no support or guidance when facing abandonment, leaving them to figure out what to do through a trial-and-error process on their own. Abandonment introduces cost for otherwise seemingly free dependencies, but users can decide whether and how to prepare for abandonment through a number of different strategies, such as dependency monitoring, building abstraction layers, and community involvement. In many cases, community members can invest in resources that help others facing the same abandoned dependency, but often do not because of the many other competing demands on their time – a form of the volunteer’s dilemma. We discuss cost reduction strategies and ideas to overcome this volunteer’s dilemma. Our findings can be used directly by open-source users seeking resources on dealing with dependency abandonment, or by researchers to motivate future work supporting the sustainable use of open source. 
    more » « less
  3. Abstract EarthCube Data Discovery Studio (DDStudio) is a crossdomain geoscience data discovery and exploration portal. It indexes over 1.65 million metadata records harvested from 40+ sources and utilizes a configurable metadata augmentation pipeline to enhance metadata content, using text analytics and an integrated geoscience ontology. Metadata enhancers add keywords with identifiers that map resources to science domains, geospatial features, measured variables, and other characteristics. The pipeline extracts spatial location and temporal references from metadata to generate structured spatial and temporal extents, maintaining provenance of each metadata enhancement, and allowing user validation. The semantically enhanced metadata records are accessible as standard ISO 19115/19139 XML documents via standard search interfaces. A search interface supports spatial, temporal, and text‐based search, as well as functionality for users to contribute, standardize, and update resource descriptions, and to organize search results into shareable collections. DDStudio bridges resource discovery and exploration by letting users launch Jupyter notebooks residing on several platforms for any discovered datasets or dataset collection. DDStudio demonstrates how linking search results from the catalog directly to software tools and environments reduces time to science in a series of examples from several geoscience domains. URL: datadiscoverystudio.org 
    more » « less
  4. This Innovative Practice Work in Progress presents a plugin tool named DroidPatrol. It can be integrated with the Android Studio to perform tainted data flow analysis of mobile applications. Most vulnerabilities should be addressed and fixed during the development phase. Computer users, managers, and developers agree that we need software and systems that are “more secure”. Such efforts require support from both the educational institutions and learning communities to improve software assurance, particularly in writing secure code. Many open source static analysis tools help developers to maintain and clean up the code. However, they are not able to find potential security bugs. Our work is aimed to checking of security issues within Android applications during implementation. We provide an example hands-on lab based on DroidPatrol prototype and share the initial evaluation feedback from a classroom. The initial results show that the plugin based hands-on lab generates interests among learners and has the promise of acting as an intervention tool for secure software development. 
    more » « less
  5. This Innovative Practice Work in Progress presents a plugin tool named DroidPatrol. It can be integrated with the Android Studio to perform tainted data flow analysis of mobile applications. Most vulnerabilities should be addressed and fixed during the development phase. Computer users, managers, and developers agree that we need software and systems that are “more secure”. Such efforts require support from both the educational institutions and learning communities to improve software assurance, particularly in writing secure code. Many open source static analysis tools help developers to maintain and clean up the code. However, they are not able to find potential security bugs. Our work is aimed to checking of security issues within Android applications during implementation. We provide an example hands-on lab based on DroidPatrol prototype and share the initial evaluation feedback from a classroom. The initial results show that the plugin based hands-on lab generates interests among learners and has the promise of acting as an intervention tool for secure software development. 
    more » « less