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Weeks:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Week 2
May 29th - Jun 4th
A key event marking this week was the DIEGO lab symposium on Friday. DIEGO lab is the name of Prof. Gonzalez's lab. During the symposium Prof. Gonzalez gave
a brief presentation demonstrating the structure and functions of biomedical informatics and emphazing on its incredible importance in
biomedical research. Other graduate students who were members of this lab also presented their projects. It was interesting to know what everyone was working on and inspiring as well to
hear about their succcess. I was also able to meet with Jian and Laura, both of whom are working on different sections of the Adverse Reaction project, during the symposium. Jian is building a web crawler for
extracting mention of ADR in social networking sites while Laura is annotating ADR in text. After the symposium Prof. Gonzalez gave me some more
papers to read and explained the project in greater detail.
I spent the weekend reading the papers. The fact that I had a non-functioning laptop really didn't help much and I was extremely bored. I wanted
to meet other ASU students in the dorm but I hardly saw anyone around. The Downtown Phoenix campus is a small campus in ASU plus it's summer now so there
are very few residents around. I spent a lot of time on the terrace (I love that place...and the
weather's so perfect during evenings here!) and met one student there. Also, Skatje and I went to Tempe where
ASU has its main campus. That campus is huge! We also tried out a Ethiopian restaurant that day in Tempe. The food was good and reminded me of food back home
since it was a bit similar (didn't really expect that). However the background music was a bit annoying. They kept playing a short 1 minute long
tune again and again and again...
During the week I did a short experiment to test the hypothesis that there is more similarity between the genes affected by a drug and
the genes involved in its known ADR than between the former and genes involved in random ADR. This experiment actually had a lot of loopholes and
ended up not being too effective. However we noticed a few interesting patterns through it. My laptop in addition to having a dysfunctional
screen had also become incredibly slow. One day it got hanged 8 times and restarted on its own for no apparant reason twice within 5 hrs. I
was really sick of it and could barely get any work done with it. Getting it fixed would have cost as much as buying a new one and so I bought one although this made me almost broke. I got a Lenovo laptop
(SL500) and found a great ecoupon for it online, which made it very cheap. Really wanted to buy a mac though...
My laptop will take at least three more weeks to get here :((...
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