Note: As of October 2016, this TEDx Talk is now available here.
We feel honoured to be part of TEDx Calgary! The wonderful team at TEDx Calgary had invited Dr. Christian Jacob to join the group of speakers for an outstanding event on Saturday, May 7th, 2016, hosted by the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary.
In front of the Libin Theatre at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary
Christian at the beginning of his TEDx talk, explaining his passion to untangle complex systems through illustrations and simulations
Christian was one of 10 speakers. Under the title “Scientists, start your engines! Game engines, that is.“, Christian talked about how modern game development engines are being used for interactive illustration, scientific story telling and virtual experiments. A brief glimpse into LINDSAY Body Universes gave an impression of how medical education is evolving into engaging story telling about human anatomy and physiology. We are closer to building “Google Earth for the Human Body” than we might think: a collection of explorable body universes at a wide range of scales — from proteins, cells and tissues to organs, systems, and whole body simulations.
For the TEDx Calgary Silk Road event interactions, our LINDSAY team — Tim Davison, Douglas Yuen, Markus Santoso, and Justin Kelly — set up a fabulous display of what our lab is working on:
Eukaryo (Douglas Yuen): an interactive, 3-dimensional, fully immersive model of a eukaryotic cell. We have described this extensive model, which includes various pathways of a cell’s metabolism and its key organelles. This work is published in a paper presented at ALIFE 2016, Cancun, Mexico.
Prokaryo (Afshin Esmaeili): an agent-based, interactive model of an E. coli bacterium. This model illustrates the gene expression processes of transcription, translation, and simplified protein folding. The original Prokaryo system was published in BMC Bioinformatics. A colony of prokaryotic cells and their chemotactic behaviours is described in an ALIFE 2016 article.
Virtual Body Gallery (Nicole Ewert): a gallery of human anatomy as an immersive experience. See our brief video on the LINDSAY Virtual Human YouTube channel.
Heart Fly-through (Areesha Salman): follow a red blood cell on its journey through the heart. See our brief video on the LINDSAY Virtual Human YouTube channel.
anARtomy (Dr. Markus Santoso): demonstrations of using augmented reality technology to project anatomy models onto one’s own body or decorate any space with virtual anatomical specimens. Check out our video on the LINDSAY Virtual Human YouTube channel.
Procedural Anatomy (Tim Davison): programmatically generated anatomical worlds form the building blocks for our multi-scale “Body Universes.”
Interactive Evolutionary Design (Justin Kelly): we use interactive evolutionary design techniques to create, evaluate, and optimize parameter settings for virtual experiments. This is a first step towards “Augmented Intelligence”, where AI (Artificial Intelligence) where machine learning is combined with Visual Analytics, thus keeping the human expert in the loop as an evaluator and designer.