Nathan Palmer provided a masterful review of database optimizations (a Stonbreakerian view) over the last 40 years and what’s real in the current arguments (e.g. main-memory oriented vs. disk oriented, logging vs no-logging, dynamic locking vs multithreading, Hadoops vs SQL). Definitely at the heart of core scaling issues of big data. Also nice review of how mainstream row-level database systems are getting on the OLTP bandwagon.

Shawn Murphy, Tianxi Cai and Griffin Weber described several additional approaches to probabilistic patient matching and the experiments under way.

Aim 3 report came in from Peter Tonellato. Brownstein et al., working on the social web data, Chirag et al. on environmental data and the MT/HMS group evaluating different pipeline approaches (including the use of infrastructure tools such as Julia and SciDB)

David Bernick led a discussion of the extensive teams working on data linkage, API development, cloud hosting, meta-data index and how to use our shared resources.

John Brownstein gave a nice heads up on his PIC-SURE project on mining Twitter for health status on an hourly and diseases-specific basis: The Digital Phenotype...