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Rosalind and Coursera. Rosalind: learning bioinformatics through problem solving Coursera: on-line education from top universities Friday October 12 th 2012 BioAssist programmers meeting Freek de Bruijn (NBIC). Warning. Rosalind and/or Coursera may cause serious fun
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Rosalind and Coursera Rosalind: learning bioinformatics through problem solving Coursera: on-line education from top universities Friday October 12th 2012 BioAssist programmers meeting Freek de Bruijn (NBIC)
Warning • Rosalind and/or Coursera may cause serious fun • NBIC is not responsible for any addictions you acquire...
Rosalind: short overview • what: • learning bioinformatics through problem solving • real challenges from molecular biology • use your favorite programming language • solutions are checked automatically • name commemorates Rosalind Franklin • when: since July 2012, beta, seems stable • who: team from University of California at San Diego and Saint Petersburg Academic University • where: rosalind.info • warning: short problems with biological background, quick gratification, highly addictive!
Rosalind: get ahead of the curve • Early adopters are already busy solving those challenges, so get a piece of the action now!
Coursera: short overview • what: • education technology company • collaboration with 33 universities • many fields like computer science, biology and mathematics • > 1 million students from 196 countries have enrolled • received $16 million of venture capital • when: since April 2012, public beta, seems stable • who: computer scientists Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller • where: coursera.org • warning: longer courses on lots of subjects, official certificate after completion, highly addictive!
Coursera: a Scala course • Scala is a great new general purpose programming language combining object oriented and functional programming • Scala is designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way • Scala is statically typed and has type inference • Scala is used by LinkedIn, EDFT, Twitter, Novell, the Guardian, Xebia, Xerox, FourSquare, Sony, Siemens and many others • Martin Odersky is the main designer of the language • He built the current generation of javac, the Java compiler He is currently teaching a course on functional programming in Scala!
Similar projects • Project Euler: http://projecteuler.net/problems • Khan Academy: khanacademy.org • Codecademy: http://www.codecademy.com/about • Code Jam: http://code.google.com/codejam/contests.html • Class Central: http://www.class-central.com/#learnmore gives overview of courses from Coursera, Udacity and edX warning: one extra day of time per week might not be enough, highly addictive!
Yet another warning • Be careful with these so called “social networks” like Google+, Twitter and Facebook because new addictions can strike at any moment... ;-)