Accelerating Discovery

230 ◾ Acce lerating Disc over y

methodology was able to nd this connection in a manner of minutes,

when it took months for the human experts to nd the same causal path-

way. It turns out to be much more dicult for a human brain to see all the

interconnections that might be relevant to a given causal chain, starting

from a single node. Computers, on the other hand, are quite good at see-

ing all the possibilities. e network visualization is a great way to bridge

that gap, giving the human expert the power to understand what the com-

puter has uncovered and focus attention on those linkages that are most

likely to lead to new discoveries or treatments, while ignoring linkages

that are spurious or irrelevant because they do not apply in ...