Stephen Piccolo

Associate Professor of Biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT (USA). Bioinformatics, genomics, data science, informatics education (opinions my own).

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@Iffynwosu @BYU Congratulations, Ifeanyi!!

[Ifeanyichukwu Nwosu @Iffynwosu]

Its official. I am now Dr. Nwosu🥳
Successfully defended my PhD in #bioinformatics at @BYU. Super grateful to my advisor @stevepiccolo for taking a chance on this former wet lab biologist and making a bioinformatician out of me.

Looking for #postdoc positions. Please RT

[Ifeanyichukwu Nwosu @Iffynwosu]

Graduating with a PhD in bioinformatics, and looking for postdoc positions in the US.

Proficient in R, Python, Linux, ML and Docker. See https://t.co/1ps69qeitF for recent projects, and excited to work on new projects.

Please RT and share.
#postdoc #Bioinformatics

[Jude Binkley @JudeBinkley]

Historic.

Jasmin Paris becomes the first woman to finish all five loops of the Barkley Marathons. Seconds to spare.

She's the 20th person ever to finish the race in its 38-year history #BM100

[Molecular Cancer Research @MCR_AACR]

#OnlineFirst: Integrating Clinical Cancer and PTM #Proteomics Data Identifies an ACK1 #Kinase Activation Mechanism, by Balasooriya, @andersenlab et al.
https://t.co/Iv7h8XOSkW
@stevepiccolo @BYU @MassGeneralNews @harvardmed @UofUMedicine @NDSU

[Patricia Palagi - Hope for better 🇧🇷 🚩🌟! @P_Palagi]

📢Don't miss the ISCBacademy webinar on 🗓️Thu, Nov 9 at 11 am EDT hosted by @ISCBedu. @stevepiccolo will talk about “Empirical evaluations of large language models for #bioinformatics #education and research”. ℹ️to connect at https://t.co/3B8GWmUADD. #training #ML #LLM

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

The latest paper from our lab. We expanded on the analyses from the earlier preprint. "Evaluating a large language model’s ability to solve programming exercises from an introductory bioinformatics course" https://t.co/3jslFOdBpU #ai #llm #bioinformatics #csed

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

The Bear Coast https://t.co/cL4LM6figd #conservation #biodiversity

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

This paper is the result of a huge effort by Ifeanyi to curate and annotate publicly available #transcriptomics datasets from #breastcancer patients. The datasets are now more findable, interoperable, and reusable. Please use the data and pass it along to others! #fairdata

[Ifeanyichukwu Nwosu @Iffynwosu]

We create a reproducible, computational pipeline to download the data, perform quality checks, renormalize the raw gene-expression measurements, and assign gene identifiers from multiple databases.

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@slavov_n Tipping

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@daborbolla What's the right balance in your opinion?

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

This scares me a lot. "AI-Controlled Drone Goes Rogue, 'Kills' Human Operator in USAF Simulated Test" https://t.co/oImfahOhuY

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@ariel_hippen Way to go!

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@bacteRoy I'd love to understand more about what you are asking.

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

"Many bioinformatics programming tasks can be automated with ChatGPT" https://t.co/pFnEv8GaRe (a preprint with original research findings that I wrote with colleagues). Before drawing conclusions, give it a read (including the Discussion section)!

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@dan2nic Yes, there is probably overlap on some conceptually, but these exercises have never been released in the public domain previously. The paper provides details.

[Aaron @aaron_mckenna]

Pretty awesome survey of what ChatGPT can do: https://t.co/Ay54iKkGPq. We've changed our graduate bioinformatics class to allow/encourage LLMs, it's nice to be able to focus on the bigger picture in homework questions (+ edge cases).

[Brig Daniels @BrighamDaniels]

I saw that @BYU had its sprinklers on already. Given the great need of the Great Salt Lake and the reservoirs, please, let’s all hold off on watering grass for a bit longer.

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@pjtatlow Not anytime soon. I'm still in the camp that says people need to demonstrate mastery on their own. Happy to chat more about plans for research to try to find a happy medium with using LLMs in homework context (connecting CodeBuddy to their API).

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@metapredict I agree! Our Discussion section touches on the idea that LLMs aren't going to replace human judgement anytime soon. It might make people more efficient at doing the wrong thing. But the reality is that the technology is here to stay so we need to grapple with it.

[Stephen Piccolo @stevepiccolo]

@wait_sasha @nuclocsig @dr_alphalyrae @JohnMHancock Yes! We have lots of ideas for research questions around using LLMs, especially in an education context, including within an open-source tool that we created for teaching programming.