Presentation from the October 2012 NBIC (Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre) BioAssist programmer's meeting. There are two main topics: Rosalind, a web site for learning bioinformatics through problem solving, and Coursera, a platform for on-line education from top universities. Finally a few similar projects are mentioned.

1. 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)

2. Warning
• Rosalind and/or Coursera may cause serious fun
• NBIC is not responsible for any addictions you acquire...

3. Rosalind: how I got trapped

4. 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!

5. Rosalind: quick demo

6. Rosalind: get ahead of the curve
• Early adopters are already busy solving those challenges, so get a
piece of the action now!

7. Coursera: how I got trapped

8. 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!

9. 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!

10. Coursera: quick demo

11. 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!

12. Yet another warning
• Be careful with these so called “social networks” like Google+,
Twitter and Facebook because new addictions can strike at any
moment... ;-)