Enable meaningful manipulation of a growing ocean of genomic data by focusing on the human needs of its Makers and Managers.
Context
IBM Maelstrom Internship Incubator Project, Summer 2017
Domain
Storage, Meta-Data Management, Genomic Analysis
TeaM MAtes
Austin Robichaud, Marcus Meldon, Ailbhe Larkin, Eric Yamane
The Problem
Genomic analysis unlocks the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment. Despite rapid advancements in both the size and complexity of genomic data, the tools storage admins have to manage this output have not kept pace. Tackling needs for the storage, management, and sharing of these data will require much more than the home-grown solutions of today.
In response to this industry need, our incubator team worked on a meta-data management tool for storage administrators at genomic research centers. We aimed to create a tool that would give you greater visibility into the storage system. Because when admins know what’s in their system, they can start making it more meaningful to others and redirect precious funding from storing unnecessary data to advancing a cancer research agenda.
Home dashboard in our proposed design. Featured in our final presentation to executive stakeholders.
My role
As the design researcher on this 5 person team, I was responsible for conducting interviews with sponsor users, including storage administrators, genomic researchers, and bioinformatics specialists at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Stanford University, Nanyang Technological University, and the Broad Institute.
Today
After our incubator project ended, it was developed into a fully viable product, which is available for use today as IBM Spectrum Discover, providing data insight for exabyte-scale unstructured storage, both on-premises and in the cloud. This metadata enables data scientists, storage administrators, and data stewards to efficiently manage, classify and gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data.