Integrative biomedical informatics

The National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI) is one of seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing in the NIH Roadmap. NCIBI is based at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Dr. Brian D. Athey is the Founding Director and Principal Investigator for the NCIBI. NCIBI is aimed to facilitate scientific exploration of complex disease processes on a much larger scale than is currently feasible. NCIBI develops and interactively integrates analytical, computational and modeling technologies to acquire or create context-appropriate molecular biology information from emerging experimental data, genomic databases and the published literature. The NCIBI supports information access and data analysis workflow of collaborating biomedical researchers, enabling them to build computational and knowledge models of biological systems validated through focused work on specific diseases. The NCIBI allows scientists to easily explore and understand complex diseases by building a user-centric environment containing integrated biomedical information. NCIBI is organized in a problem-centric style that harnesses the power of genomics, bioinformatics, proteomics, pathways and integrated systems. It provides customizable workflow environments and biomedical literature text mining. Knowledge environments being developed at NCIBI are allowing researchers to repeat this type of analysis in the many context-dependent variations that the investigation may invoke. NCIBI computing systems automate and drive these analyses to much larger scales than the researcher can accomplish. This plenary keynote lecture focus on the interactive research of NCIBI.