20190225 UWC Bioinfo A Computer Sci

This is the first of five lectures for the bioinformatics unit in the B.Sc. Honours program at the UWC Department of Biotechnology. In it, I opened with the topic of meta-data, the information that tells us how the data relate to our experimental objectives. I spent quite a bit of time on the concept of representing different kinds of data in bit patterns: decimal numbers, characters, and images. We discussed three different strategies for compression: run-length encoding, Huffman Codes, and lossy compression. We talked about the ways in which the time to complete an algorithm may scale with reference to the size of data supplied to it. All of these concepts impact many bioinformatic implementations.