Jim Kent

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Jim Kent
Photo courtesy of Jim Kent.
Born (1960-02-10) February 10, 1960 (age 64)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of California, Santa Cruz
AwardsOverton Prize
Benjamin Franklin Award (Bioinformatics)
Scientific career
ThesisPatching and painting the working draft of the human genome (2002)
Doctoral advisorAlan M Zahler
Other academic advisorsDavid Haussler[1]
Websitewww.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent

William James Kent (born February 10, 1960) is an American

computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects and the 2003 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award
.

Early life

Kent was born in

.

Computer animation

Kent began his programming career in 1983 with Island Graphics Inc. where he wrote the Aegis Animator program for the

PC compatibles, where the image compression improved to the point it could play off of hard disk, and one could paint using "inks" that performed algorithmic transformations such as smoothing, transparency, and tiled patterns. The Autodesk Animator was used to create artwork for a wide variety of video games.[4]

Involvement with the Human Genome Project

In 2000, he wrote a program, GigAssembler,

open source in the sense that the source code can be downloaded and read for free, and all of the software can be freely used for academic, nonprofit, and personal use, some of it requires a license, either from UCSC or from Kent Informatics Inc., for commercial use.[9]

After GigAssembler, Kent went on to write BLAT (BLAST-like alignment tool) [10] and the UCSC Genome Browser [11] to help analyze important genome data. Kent continues to work at UCSC primarily on web tools to help understand the human genome. He helps maintain and upgrade the browser, and has worked on comparative genomics,[12] Parasol, a job control management software for the UCSC kilocluster, and the ENCODE Project.

References

  1. PMID 23382705
    .
  2. ^ "Aegis Animator ST and Art Pak ST". Atarimagazines.com. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  3. ^ "Cyber Paint". Ataricq.org. 2009-05-23. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  4. ^ Breton Slivka (2009-05-08). "Busting at the Seams: Autodesk Animator". Bustingseams.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  5. PMID 11544197
    .
  6. ^ "Jim Kent, hero of free and open source software". Archived from the original on 2012-03-20. Retrieved 2010-09-19.
  7. PMID 11237011
    .
  8. .
  9. ^ "Index of /~kent/src". Hgwdev.cse.ucsc.edu. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  10. PMID 11932250
    .
  11. .
  12. .

External links