Sharing the Journey

I was fortunate enough to one of the 500 Best of IBM winners this year. As a self introduction to the fellow BOI class, I wrote the following on the group forum.

Hi Everyone and Congratulations!

What an honor and how excited it is to be among this distinguished group of IBMers. You know that you are making a difference every day on your journey and I look forward to crossing path with you and celebrating our little milestone on the Island of Maui.

My journey started 25 years ago when I took off from Shanghai, flew over Hawaii and landed in St. Louis as a foreign student. My studies and then research took me through experiments, theories and discoveries of molecular biology and genetics. The turning point came in 1999 when the Human Genome Project started and computer entered the stage. The waves of innovation both scientifically and technologically kept coming and drawn me to the course. I spent the next 12 years exploring the frontier of high performance compting technologies at IBM, first as industry SME, then solution BDE, and finally the lead HPC architect for US. Along the way, I designed probably 50 supercomputers that entered World' Top 500 ranking. Staring 2012, I noted that many of our clients/partners were using the word "genomics" in their RFP or tenders. The era of genomic medicine had finally arrived and I was so excited that two of my paths now merged into one.

Today, I am part of Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) WW Sales team and its genomics solution initiative code-named PowerGene. Our mission is very simple: when you or your family member goes to a hospital one day to sequence the genome for diagnostic test or treatment monitoring, we want your genomic data to be processed, analyzed and stored based on PowerGene technologies, all done with Speed, Scale and SMARTS.

My BOI nomination is based on my work with one such hospital. It's called Sidra and is being built as a shining star of genomic medicine for Middle East and the World. Baked in the dessert sun of Qatar, yet armed with the coolest PowerGene technologies, Sidra is on a mission to sequence full genome of every citizen in Qatar!

If you know of a hospital, research center, university, agricultural, biotech, pharmaceutical company that is struggling with or becoming interested in technology, give me a shout and I will show up at your local airport before we meeting in Maui. You might work in a totally unrelated brand, field, organization, but you can help in ways you might not even think of.

I am also "recruiting" volunteers as developer, architect, engineer to build many PowerGene solutions such as automated workflow pipeline, massive metadata management system and hybrid cloud for elastic computing. Currently, our startup-ish dev team has 6 members and we have TGIF call every Friday that I can invite you as a guest/observer. You won't need any credential as a member of 2015 BOI class :)

Let me borrow a Chinese saying to end my introduction: 志同者道也合 -- those who share the course, share the journey.

Safe travel to Hawaii!

Finally, my call for like-minded to join the course extends to those who read this blog post :)

Bad Days

It was a bad day in New York LaGuardia Airport today. The snow was falling down hard then blowing side way fast. Every canceled flight drove panic passengers from gate to gate and in my case one concourse to another. The despair descended into desperation as a Delta plane skidded out of runway and closed down the airport. I made many calls to American Airlines service desk for rebooking and it took longer for every call to go through. It was clear that the surge of calls was overwhelming the airline computer systems and service resources.

While on hold for the call, I suddenly recalled a meeting I had few days ago with a healthcare researcher. He told me about the frustration of getting sufficient and timely computing resources to run cancer genomics analytical pipelines. The problem was more pronoun when there were real patients whose genomic data needed to be analyzed in clinical grade (high-depth) and with fast turnaround (hours vs days).

Looking through the window at the snow plow and truck struggling to flight the blizzard, I asked myself: as a information technologist, can you do more to help this battle?  This is a battle waging in every hospital around the world, against a much worse natural enemy that inflicts pain on millions of families including my own.

What if we can build a much capable, faster and smarter computer to aid the battles against cancer? With that, maybe we will be able to turn many bad days of a suffering family into good days. To get there, I won't mind suffering a bad day like today along the journey to frontier.

#NoMoreBadDays

#J2F_PowerGene

#abw4_et1509


Written 12:30AM in a hotel in New York while waiting for another flight home in 12 hours.