Inspiration
I like the voice-enabled experience and hope to migrate the tools and knowledge in my research domain to Alexa. I am a computational biologist, and every day, I may need to check the signals of some interest genes in a certain cell line. If we can use voice to navigate the genome, especially the gene I am interested, I can free my hand and feel really cool. So I developed gene tracer lite that can show the signal track of a gene on the genome. It will show the gene's location, start and end position, and histone modification signals on around that gene for the histone modifications are thought to be correlated with the gene activity and functional regulations.
What it does
This lite version includes a simple intent that can show the signal track on the genome when user provides a gene or the skill randomly select a gene.
How I built it
The 'gene tracer lite' includes three parts: the model, lambda function and node.js based server.
Challenges I ran into
There are many challenges when I built this skill. This skill is actually a lite version because the pro version cannot be finished by the deadline. The recognization of gene name is a great challenge because most of the gene is an abbreviation of some words and not a regular English word. So we provide a random selection or ask user to spell the gene names. The second challenge is how to visualize the genome signals. We tried different ways: generate a figure on demand when user asks a question and pre-generate for all the genes. Finally, we use the later one but it may limit the user's experience.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The accomplishments I am proud of is that I built the whole skills, including the database, material preparation, logo design, nodejs-based server etc in about 2 weeks from almost very limited javascript background. I find it is very interesting and will continue to finish the pro version, even there is no rewards.
What's next for gene tracer lite
I will continue to work on the pro version, which will provide good dialogue management, more functions and real-time updating and better user experiences.
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