Dave Patterson wrote an article in the December 6th 2011 edition of the New York Times, calling on Computer Scientists to bring their skills to the fight against cancer.   He states: “The war against cancer is increasingly moving into cyberspace. Computer scientists may have the best skills to fight cancer in the next decade — and they should be signing up in droves.”

He also describes how the AMPLab agenda fits with this mission: “The Big Data research challenge is to develop technology that can obtain timely and cost-effective answers to Big Data questions. A Berkeley team of eight faculty members and 40 Ph.D. students is rising to that challenge via three initiatives: inventing algorithms based on statistical machine learning; harnessing many machines in the cloud; and developing crowd-sourcing techniques to get people to help answer questions that prove too hard for our algorithms and machines.   Algorithms, machines and people gave our new lab its name: the AMP Lab.”

See the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/david-patterson-enlist-computer-scientists-in-cancer-fight.html