ivogeorg

Is the Certificate format going to continue to have a Capstone Project? If yes, will it offer closer interaction with the authors of the course sequence?

In light of your answer, do you see a need for closer integration between the fields of systems biology and quantitative biology?

Thank you for your reply! Making latent prior knowledge operational, especially in the era of permanent big data, has fascinated me for a while, especially extracting "mechanism" from scientific literature. Many people are trying to do that, including DARPA's Big Mechanism, but it looks like there is a serious gap between the mental models expert human beings work from and the usefulness of these models when encoded in an external medium. How can we make the latter as rich and flexible as the former?

Thank you for your reply! And a special thank you for this AMA session. It alone shows that the Sysbio Spec has not been just abandoned to the Coursera's "On demand" shelf. I love Coursera, but they can't possibly tend to all the material if the original authors decide to move on. The amount of data that Sysbio is generating nowadays is astonishing. I think the ideal Capstone would be up-to-date, so it is still relevant in the context of the state of the art, but should also be scaffolded, so it really becomes the capstone learning experience of the specialization. And it would last for enough (perhaps 3-4) months that both the students and the authors would have time to participate meaningfully.