Spinneret: Aiding Creative Ideation through Non-Obvious Concept Associations

Mind mapping is a popular way to explore a design space in creative thinking exercises, allowing users to form associations between concepts. Yet, most existing digital tools for mind mapping focus on authoring and organization, with little support for addressing the challenges of mind mapping such as stagnation and design fixation. We present Spinneret, a functional approach to aid mind mapping by providing suggestions based on a knowledge graph. Spinneret uses biased random walks to explore the knowledge graph in the neighborhood of an existing concept node in the mind map, and provides "suggestions" for the user to add to the mind map. A comparative study with a baseline mind-mapping tool reveals that participants created more diverse and distinct concepts with Spinneret, and reported that the suggestions inspired them to think of ideas they would otherwise not have explored.Comment: ACM CHI 202

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead