Next generation DNA sequencing technologies have turned the vision of precision medicine into a plausible reality, but also threaten to overwhelm computing infrastructures with unprecedented volumes of data. A recent $1.3M award from the National Institutes of Health will allow researchers at the University of Illinois and Stanford to help address this challenge by developing novel data compression strategies. Anyone who has struggled with the logistics of working with, saving, or sharing large computer files can empathize with the challenge faced by today's biomedical researchers and medical practitioners. However, the genomic data files that these groups are beginning to produce on a routine basis are orders of magnitude larger than the average movie or digital photo; a single human genome sequence takes up around 140 GB. Olgica Milenkovic, an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, and Stanford Professor of Electrical Engineering Tsachy Weissman are coPIs on the project. Continue reading at link below.