The University of Missouri-Columbia is awarded an early career development grant for Dr. Chi-Ren Shyu to develop new approaches to knowledge federation of visual phenotypes that can function and flourish in today's landscape of diverse, constantly changing and inconsistent databases, schema, and terminology. The knowledge-sharing hub proposed in the project has the ability to use disparate computational resources to reliably exchange data and computations with little intervention from the user. A second challenge is to develop methods that answer the researchers' hybrid queries, which are combinations of scientific expertise and algorithms that detect and retrieve information related by image features, semantic description, map location, and patterns of DNA sequences, even when those data are not currently correlated with each other in the partner's databases. The proposed hybrid query system will be the first and only in the research community that allows a researcher or an educator to submit an image of a mutant to the database and ask, "What genes or environmental factors cause this visual phenotype?" The [roject includes an educational component with two unique aspects: One focus is on training of undergraduate and graduate students and creating courses for them that are closely aligned with the research activities. The new courses, titled "Content Management in Bioinformatics," and "Computer Vision and Image Understanding in Bioinformatics" will be pioneering courses in computational biology curriculum design. The other focus will leverage the proposed research activities to create, in conjunction with traditional computer science courseware, scientific data repositories for computation and biology education.
