One of the jurors of our Pi Day Coding Competition is Paolo Di Domenico, co-founder and CTO of Allelica, a fast-growing startup that allows complex diseases risk predictions through the computation of a polygenic risk score based on thousands or millions of genetic variants. “Any single task in our company involves the use of cutting edge technology in the amazing field of Genetic science – says Paolo – We provide, as a service, a software able to predict the risk of developing complex diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, breast or prostate cancer, using models based on artificial intelligence. Even more, with our software it is possible to discover new predictors thanks to the power of a dataset with more than 35 TeraByte of data“.
Working at Allelica means more than just learning something new every day, says Paolo: “It means discovering new things. Apply the machine learning technologies to health means to help the science overcome its limits and really improve the lives of people. Working at Allelica I learned that any line of code can be a precious new step on this path”.
What are the main technologies you use at Allelica?
Being a cloud-native company, everything we do is done in a cloud environment. GCP & AWS are our ‘houses’. We use a wide range of technologies to achieve our goals: while the core of our software is built on Python, Pandas, Numpy, Tensorflow, Scikit, and Keras are always included in our Notebooks. We also use R and Java. We have PHP and Flask for our front-end services with massive use of framework and libraries both for server-side & client-side applications. We have a native app for both iOs & Android, and everything is connected via API (JSON/RESTful).
Why did you choose those technologies and what do you use them for?
We are in the cloud because it gives us the flexibility to work on VMs perfectly tailored to the requirements of the (very) different analysis we perform and it gives us the possibility to scale and to use parallel computing as well. Python is our core language because of the incredible amount of libraries ready to be used, and JSON/RESTful APIs give to all the functions developed in our backend the capability to interact with all our frontend systems (such as the apps and the web interfaces). We strongly believe that there is the right tool for everything so we are always opened to embed a new technology if it can fit better our necessity.
Describe the developers working at Allelica and tell us what are you looking for.
We are a passionate team of developers working hard to bring Health science to the next level, it’s an amazing work and we are looking for someone who embraces this cause with our enthusiasm. While at the moment we are looking mainly for a frontend able to communicate to the world how beautiful is what we do, we are always open to talent.
