Bioinformatics & Big Data 1 10:20-12:00 in Eden Vale C1 - C2 Chairs: Prof. John Quackenbush / Harvard Dept of Biostatistics & Prof. Wei Ding / Director - Knowledge Discovery Lab U.Mass Boston Invited Talk Apache Spark - In Memory Big Data Analytics Prof. Matei Zaharia. MIT CSAIL - Founder DataBricks Invited Talk Pfizer’s Computing Infrastructure for Molecular Design: use of HPC, the Cloud, and Service-Oriented Architecture Dr. Enoch Huang, Head of Computational Sciences Pfizer DAWN: Rapid Larse-Scale Protein Multiple Sequence Alignment and Conservation Analysis Darrell O. Ricke, Anna Shcherbina, MIT Lincoln Laboratory Understanding of protein structure, function, and disease can be obtained from the analysis of protein sequences evolutionary conservation. Multiple sequence alignments of different isolates, orthologs, paralogs, and functional domains provide essential insights into protein function and structure. Evolutionary conservation level is directly correlated with likelihood of missense mutations’ functional impact. A new conservation characterization tool, Dawn, that aligns sequences based on the Divergence Model of protein evolution can align and characterize large numbers of related protein sequences rapidly. Using this tool, a performance improvement of at least two orders of magnitude improvement over current methods. Dawn is applied to three pressing challenges: identification of antiviral targets for therapeutics, multigene family alignment, and analysis of human missense mutations (variants). Invited Talk Discovering Disease Subtypes from Data Prof. Jennifer Dy, Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering - Northeastern Invited Talk High Performance Computing in RNA Bioinformatics Prof. Peter Clote, Dept of Biology - Boston College