Oliver KennedyNov 26
One of my projects, #VizierDB, evolved into a company called #BreadcrumbAnalytics a few years ago. I'm proud of the tech, but want to call out the CEO, Tom Slowe, for being a real stand up guy, and for steering the company accordingly. I will admit to bias here, and they're by no means unique in this respect, but it's refreshing to see a company who's path to success involves not only empowering communities, but also explicitly distancing itself from the communities' power centers.
Oliver KennedyJul 20, 2025

After spending the day in Dependency Hell™, today marks the formal release of #VizierDB 2.1.1. The 2.1 branch includes a number of papercut fixes, as well as support for plugins and modularizing workflows as scripts.

https://github.com/VizierDB/vizier-scala/releases/tag/v2.1.1

Release v2.1.1 · VizierDB/vizier-scala

Significant User-Facing Changes Workflows can now be exported as 'Scripts' for use in other workflows (#294) Vizier now supports plugin modules. Pass a path to a plugin jar with --plugin or as a ...

GitHub
Oliver KennedyDec 11, 2024

Tom was on the National Pharmaceutical Congress podcast last week, talking about the importance of context and #Provenance, and of keeping humans in the driver's seat when using AI to support pharmaceutical research.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6cgCLv3GGJgNyDqHQPLBot

#BreadcrumbAnalytics #VizierDB #DataScience

S13 E05 AI and the Importance of Data to Pharma Marketers

National Pharmaceutical Congress (NPC) Podcast · Episode

Spotify
Oliver KennedyNov 22, 2024

Grats to #BreadcrumbAnalytics on their work supporting a recent landmark study by #UBuffalo's Andy Talal on the efficacy of telemedicine in hepatitis-C treatment.

Quoth Tom:
> "By addressing the complex challenges of data reproducibility and governance, we ensure that critical research like this can lead to tangible improvements in patient care and treatment strategies."

Study Overview: https://medicine.buffalo.edu/news_and_events/news/2024/04/jama-talal-hcv-telemedicine-19662.html

Breadcrumb's Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/breadcrumb-analytics_ai-datascience-healthcareinnovation-activity-7264989620046577665-kZ1I

#VizierDB

JAMA Paper: In People with Opioid Use Disorder, Telemedicine Treatment for HCV was More Than Twice as Successful as Off-Site Referral

People with opioid use disorder who have hepatitis C virus were twice as likely to be successfully treated and cured if they received facilitated telemedicine treatment at their opioid treatment program.

Oliver KennedyAug 8, 2024

I'm getting back into #VizierDB development after a lengthy hiatus with an experiment in polyglot IDEs. Although the experiment was not (yet) successful, it's opened up several ideas for Vizier, including ways to improve Vizier's state model, and decouple it from #ApacheSpark to also allow lighter-weight SQL engines like #DuckDB. I'm also inspired to explore #Curses as an alternative frontend to Vizier.

For now, just some maintenance with Vizier's plugin architecture.
https://github.com/VizierDB/vizier-scala/issues/288

Factor Sedona out into a plugin · Issue #288 · VizierDB/vizier-scala

At some point, we're going to need to start enabling support for plugins. In particular, things seem to be getting to the point where Sedona has tendrils in enough parts of Vizier that it's probabl...

GitHub
Oliver KennedyAug 2, 2024

This is now the fourth time that I've handled TA assignments for my department. It's always a pain juggling about 2-3 spreadsheets (with different views of the data) and a half-dozen websites (with supporting data).

Last year, I finally got https://vizierdb.info spreadsheet mode working, and this semester I was ready to give it a go. Holy hell was the experience far more pleasant: ~2 full days -> 4-6 hours of effort.

#VizierDB

The Vizier Workbook

Vizier, a workflow system disguised as a notebook. Vizier gives lets you explore and transform data with the power and reliability of a workflow system, and the flexibility and convenience of a notebook.