ABSTRACT
Since the turn of the century there have been remarkable and revolutionary developments in the acquisition of biological data. The publication of the first draft of the human genome [[VAM+01]] in 2001 was a milestone in this revolution, heralding rapid transformation in almost every realm of biology. A sampling of the rapid progress on fundamental problems includes the enumeration of genomic variations in thousands of individuals [[C+12a]], detailed molecular characterization of thousands of cancers [[MFB+08]], single cell characterization of tumors [[PTT+14]], study of developmental processes [[TCG+14]], and the elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of DNA in the nucleus of cells [[DMRM13],[LABW+09]]. Biology has become an extremely data-rich discipline.
