Jim Kent

Infobox Person
name = Jim Kent


image_size = 180px
caption = "Photo courtesy of Jim Kent."
birth_date = birth date and age|1960|2|10
birth_place = Hawaii
death_date =
death_place =
education = University of California, Santa Cruz
occupation = Research scientist
title =
spouse =
parents =
children =
nationality = United States
website = [http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent/ Personal Webpage at UCSC]

Jim Kent (born February 10, 1960) is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects.

Biography

Kent was born in Hawaii and grew up in San Francisco, California, United States. He currently lives in Santa Cruz, California with new child Maia and his girlfriend Dorota.

While a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2001, he wrote a program called GigAssembler that allowed the publicly funded Human Genome Project to assemble and publish the human genome database before the commercial effort by the company, Celera Genomics. [cite web | title= Keeping Genome Data Open - An Interview with Jim Kent | work=OReilly Network | url=http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/04/05/kent.html | accessdate=2005-12-23] His efforts ensured that the human genome data remained in the Public Domain and were not patented into private Intellectual Property. Kent built a grid of cheap, commodity Personal Computers running the Linux operating system and other Free software to beat Celera's, what was thought of then as the world's most powerful civilian computer. In June 2000, thanks to the work done by Kent and several others, the Human Genome Project was able to publish its data in the Public Domain ahead of Celera. In 2002 Tim O'Reilly described Kent's work as "the most significant work of open source development in the past year".

Kent went on to write BLAT (BLAST-like alignment tool) cite journal|title=BLAT--the BLAST-like alignment tool.|journal=Genome research|date=2002- Apr|first=W James|last=Kent|volume=12|issue=4|pages=656–64|id=11932250 doi|10.1101/gr.229202. Article published online before March 2002|url=http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11932250|accessdate=2007-11-08|doi=10.1101/gr.229202. Article published online before March 2002] and the [http://genome.ucsc.edu UCSC Genome Browser] to help analyze important genome data, receiving his PhD in biology in 2002. Today at UCSC he works primarily on web tools to help understand the human genome. He helps maintain and upgrade the browser, and has worked on recent projects such as comparative genomics and Parasol, a job control management software for the UCSC kilocluster.

Before pursuing his PhD in Biology, Kent founded and ran a software company. One of his products was Cyber Paint for the Atari ST. Cyber Paint was a 2D animation program that brought together a wide variety of animation and paint functionality and the delta-compressed animation format developed for CAD-3D. The user could move freely between animation frames and paint arbitrarily, or utilize various animation tools for automatic tweening movement across frames. Cyber Paint was one of the first, if not the first, consumer program that enabled the user to paint across time in a compressed digital video format. [cite web
title= Jim Kent, hero of free and open source software
url = http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/jim_kent_hero_of_free_and_open_source_software
date = 2007-02-14
first = Gary
last = Richmond]

See also

* BLAT
* Human Genome Project#The Role of Celera Genomics

References

External links

* [http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent/ Jim Kent's Personal Webpage at UCSC]
* [http://genome.cse.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgBlat BLAT program]
* [http://www.genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgGateway UCSC Human Genome Browser]