Hit Selection When You’re Strapped for Cash

I came across a paper from Chaput et al that describes an approach to hit selection from a virtual screen (using docking), when follow-up resources are limited (a common scenario in many academic labs). Their approach is based on using multiple docking programs. As they (and others) have pointed out, there is a wide divergence […]

Cryptography & Chemical Structure Search

Encryption of chemical information has not been a very common topic in cheminformatics. There was an ACS symposium in 2005 (summary) that had a number of presentations on the topic of “safe exchange” of chemical information – i.e., exchanging information on chemical structures without sharing the structures themselves. The common thread running through many presentations was to […]

A Model Building IDE?

Recently I came across a NIPS2015 paper from Vartak et al that describes a system (APIs + visual frontend) to support the iterative model building process. The problem they are addressing is common one in most machine learning settings – building multiple models (different type) using various features and identifying one or more optimal models to […]

Summarizing Collections of Curves

I was browsing live notes from the recent IEEE conference on visualization and came across a paper about functional boxplots. The idea is an extension of the boxplot visualization (shown alongside), to a set of functions. Intuitively, one can think of a functional box plot as specific envelopes for a set of functions. The construction […]