How are you currently applying your tech- nology?
What advice do you have for young people taking their first steps in informatics right now? R.H.: The main thing is not to give up. You al- ways have difficult days, the important thing is to always keep going, to have persistence. This was one of the biggest strengths for me during my competitive days. There was a Top- coder competition every week. To make them accessible to people from all over the world, the organizers scheduled the competitions at different times. There were competitions at noon, at 6 in the afternoon, at 10 in the eve- ning, and at 4 in the morning. Over a period of two or three years, I hadn’t missed a single competition. Once a month, I had to wake up at 3–3:15 in the morning, drink coffee, and by 3:55 a.m. I was ready. The computer science competitions were re- ally very tough and that persistence, being clearheaded at 4 in the morning and thinking about a problem, was really very helpful.
R.H.: Currently, our focus is on working with medical researchers, pharmaceutical compa- nies, and in some cases hospitals. The bulk of our work is with pharmaceutical companies though. They have clinical trials when they have a new drug or some new hypothesis for a disease. To put it simply, they want to find out if the drug works or not. In the meantime, we continue to develop the technology and algorithms so that they can extract more things and be more useful. Our focus will remain medicine in the near future, but the technology has other appli- cations as well. For example, it can make our homes smarter. A sensor that “knows” who is where in the house would configure the tem- perature of each room, turn lights on or off.
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