Author Archives: Michael Kellen

About Michael Kellen

I've spent my career working at the intersection of science and technology. Currently I lead the technology team at Sage Bionetworks, but this blog contains my own thoughts.

Science in the Clouds

Posted on September 4, 2012

Recently, I sat down with Jeff Barr on the AWS report to discuss how we’ve used various Amazon services throughout our architecture while developing Synapse.  In the interview, I discussed how Synapse uses RDS (MySQL) as our back end database, … Continue reading →

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If I had a billion dollars…

Posted on August 9, 2012

In an apparently recurring theme, my thoughts again are running to the incentives that drive human behavior, this time inspired by the recent news that the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has established a new $3 Million Fundamental Physics Prize.  He’s … Continue reading →

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Motivating a challenge

Posted on July 26, 2012

In my previous post I introduced the Breast Cancer Challenge Sage is hosting to build predictive models of the disease.  The initial conception of this project was as a winner take all competition, with a clear scoring method and single … Continue reading →

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