A Pitt/Harvard team is establishing a cloud-based tool with which investigators anywhere in the world will be able to manipulate a massive autism dataset (on a server farm run by Amazon). The effort, led by Jeremy Espino, MD, director of informational technology and open-source software development for the Department of Biomedical Informatics, is slated to run for one year.

"This is a relatively new thing that's happening in research," says Espino. "Datasets are so large that it's difficult to even have enough computational resources to digest the information." The Pitt-Harvard autism team will develop a proof of concept, then share their techniques so similarly complex datasets can be made more broadly accessible. --Sharon Tregaskis for PittMed