Naomi Saphra, a PhD student in language cognition and computing at the University of Edinburgh, UK, has small-fibre neuropathy, the cause of which is unknown. “These applications share data from some of the largest sequencing studies in the world,” he says. Matthew Solomonson, a software engineer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, uses it to build web applications such as the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), which is used to explore genomic data.
Voice coding underlies a wide variety of science - any researcher who writes code could use it. And they say that there are unexpected advantages.
It takes at least a month of difficult, sometimes frustrating, training to get set up, but coding by voice helps these programmers to keep doing their jobs or continue their studies. Now, a small but growing community has developed a workaround: coding by voice command. RSI can derail the careers of computational biologists and other scientists who code. The syndrome occurs when the ulnar nerve, which travels down the outer edge of the arm, becomes pinched at the elbow, causing numbness, pain and loss of fine motor control in the hands and fingers. Pimentel had cubital tunnel syndrome caused by repetitive strain injury (RSI). Three years later, as a computational-genomics postdoc at Stanford University in California, he does just that. “My adviser jokingly said, ‘Can’t you do this by voice?’” he recalls. As a computational-biology PhD student, his work involved constant typing - and he was born with only one arm. Debilitating hand pain is always bad news, but Harold Pimentel’s was especially unwelcome.
0 kommentar(er)
