Data Warehousing

Ransomware has dominated the cybersecurity headlines these past few months, and one of its more recent and advanced variants, Crysis, suggests the threat won't be ending any time soon.

The research and advocacy group is calling upon data scientists and computational analysts to leverage its database to expand understanding of the disease.

Vice President Joe Biden unveiled the precision medicine database on Monday, speaking at its operations center at the University of Chicago. Genomic Data Commons is a National Cancer Institute initiative and is central to the National Cancer Moonshot and Precision Medicine Initiative.

The protected health information of thousands of football players may have been compromised after a backpack that held a laptop containing the digital medical records of NFL team members was stolen from the car of a Washington Redskins trainer.

IBM plans to launch a cloud-based version of Watson's cognitive computing technology, designed solely to zero in on cybersecurity language, as a part of a year-long research project, the company announced Tuesday. The Watson for Cyber Security platform is touted as the first technology to offer cognition of security data. Watson will pull the majority of its cognitive data from the X-Force research library: a threat intelligence platform with 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and more than 100,000 documented vulnerabilities. "Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cybersecurity jobs by 2020, we'd still have a skills crisis in security," Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security said in a statement. "The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime." [Also: IBM Watson offers free storage to Apple ResearchKit developers] Beginning in the fall, IBM will also collaborate with eight universities to expand the amount of security data the company has already inputted into the platform. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and New York University are among the institutions who will work with IBM to contribute to Watson's training. The students will also train Watson on cybersecurity language, while working close with IBM's security experts to learn how to read security intelligence to gain first-hand experience in cognitive security. IBM plans to process up to 15,000 security documents – threat intelligence reports, cybercrime strategies, threat databases – each month over the next training stages in collaboration will all stakeholders. Watson for Cybersecurity will not only provide insights on any emerging threats, it will also make recommendations on how to stop them. Additionally, the system will use data mining techniques to find outliers. IBM will begin beta production deployments later this year. "By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations and knowledge to security professionals," said van Zadelhoff, "bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training."

Patricia Flatley Brennan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a former practicing nurse with a Ph.D. in industrial engineering, will take the lead as director at the National Library of Medicine. The NLM is the world's largest biomedical library and the producer of digital information services used by scientists, health professionals and members of the public worldwide. National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins, MD, announced the pick today. Brennan is expected to begin her new role in August 2016. "Patti brings her incredible experience of having cared for patients as a practicing nurse, improved the lives of homebound patients by developing innovative information systems and services designed to increase their independence, and pursued cutting-edge research in data visualization and virtual reality," Collins said in a statement. For seven years, Brennan worked in both critical care and psychiatric nursing. As Collins sees it, Brennan's combination of skills makes her ideally suited to lead the NLM in the era of precision medicine. She will take charge of the library as it becomes the epicenter for biomedical data science, not just at NIH, but across the biomedical research enterprise, he noted. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is a professor at the School of Nursing and College of Engineering. She also leads the Living Environments Laboratory at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, which is developing new ways for effective visualization of high dimensional data. Brennan is recognized as a pioneer in developing information systems for patients.   She designed ComputerLink, an electronic network to reduce isolation and improve self-care among home care patients. She directed HeartCare, a web-based information and communication service that helps cardiac patients at home to recover faster, and with fewer symptoms. Brennan also directed Project HealthDesign, an initiative designed to stimulate the next generation of personal health records. She also conducts external evaluations of health information technology architectures, and works to repurpose engineering methods for healthcare. She received a master of science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following seven years of clinical practice in critical care nursing and psychiatric nursing, Brennan held several academic positions at Marquette University, Milwaukee; Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. NLM Acting Director Betsy L. Humphreys led the NLM over the past year, after Donald Lindberg, MD, retired having served more than 30 years. Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

Two-thirds of healthcare organizations believe personalized medicine is already having a measurable effect on patient outcomes, according to a new survey. Even more, 75 percent, say it will impact their organizations over the next two years.

UMMC CHIO John Showalter, MD, describes what associative data lakes, honest brokers and more mean to becoming a learning health system.

SQL Server 2016 will bring new functions for protecting data in motion and at rest, visual reporting, cloud-first features and big data analytics tools.

Microsoft purchased 10 million long oligonucleotides – DNA or RNA molecules used for genetic testing and research – from San Francisco startup Twist Bioscience, and is using them to encode digital data.