Question: What do you do as computer scientist?

Chris Needham answered on 16 Mar 2010:

As a computer scientist I’m able to write programs that get the computer to perform lots of calculations or to process much more data than I could without one. Now, sometimes there’s so much data, that a computer is necessary to process it. Models are also very important, as they are simpler representations of the data, than the data itself.

As a bioinformatics example, every protein is made up of a string of amino acids represented by 20 letters, eg part of a protein sequence: CGPHDQDRKLSTKEALDEDVPPASFWRILKLNSTEWPYFVVGI
we can find how similar 2 proteins are by comparing the sequences. This involves a model that acounts for how similar each amino acid to each other, and how important certain ones are, it’s also quite complicated as the sequences are different lengths. If we’d like to find which protein a protein is most similar to, then we’d need to check against all the proteins, and maybe all the proteins in other species, and there a databases of these.

I hope that’s a useful example. There’s so many things we can do with computers to extract information from masses of data.