For the AncestryDNA science team, October brings more than fall foliage and pumpkins. It also brings us the yearly meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), the main conference of the year in our field. On Saturday, we’ll arrive in San Diego to join thousands of other scientists for a four day conference Read More
Research into matching patterns of over a half-million AncestryDNA members translates into new DNA matching discoveries Among over 500,000 AncestryDNA customers, more than 35 million 4th cousin relationships have been identified – a number that continues to grow rapidly at an exponential rate. While that means millions of opportunities for personal discoveries by AncestryDNA members, Read More
Interested in genealogy? Curious about DNA? Fascinated by the world of big data? If so, come check out my talk at the Global Big Data Conference on DNA day this Friday, April 25 at 4pmPT in the Santa Clara Convention Center! I’ll cover Jermline, our massively-scalable DNA matching application. I’ll talk about our business, give a run-through Read More
Since May of 2012, when we first released AncestryDNA, we’ve returned results to over a quarter of a million customers. Based on feedback that we have received, those 300,000 customers have learned a great deal about their family history – their deep ancestral origins and their genetic relatives. As it turns out, AncestryDNA has also Read More
Originally published on Wired Innovation Insights, 3-12-14. There is a growing interest among mainstream consumers to learn more about who they are and where they came from. The good news is that DNA tests are no longer reserved for large medical research teams or plot lines in CSI. Now, the popularity of direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA tests Read More
Jeremy Pollack, a lead engineer at Ancestry.com, answers questions on the technical backend of AncestryDNA in a video interview with InfoQ. The interview took place after his presentation with Bill Yetman on scaling AncestryDNA using Hadoop and HBase at QConSF in 2013. Check it out!
Jeremy Pollack, an engineer on the DNA Pipeline Team, and I presented together at QCon San Francisco this week. It was a real tag team effort from two different points-of-view – the “Manager” and the “Developer” view of the same project. Having both of us on stage was a first, but it seemed to work really Read More
At Ancestry.com we face all sorts of exciting technology challenges to grow our business and support the company’s mission of helping everyone discover, preserve, and share their family history. This week, I’m excited to share some of the learnings we’ve had along the way in leveraging our data to help users make more meaningful discoveries Read More
A small tube of your saliva can reveal a lot about your family history hundreds and even thousands of years ago. At AncestryDNA, we study the DNA in that saliva – using sophisticated science – to reveal your ethnic origins. We recently announced an update to our ethnicity results which provides customers with a more Read More
Next week, the AncestryDNA science team will be flying across the country with a tube full of posters. Scientific posters, that is. We’ll be presenting them at the annual American Society of Human Genetics conference (ASHG) in Boston. This will mark AncestryDNA’s second year presenting our latest research at the largest worldwide conference in human Read More