METAxDATA: Shyam Saladi - JetFighter
Channel: QUEST Center BIH
Date: 2019-10-23

This lightning talk was delivered on October 15th 2019 at the BIH QUEST Center METAxDATA event. 
Film production by Maximilian Alexander, www.luma-frame.com

Shyam is a PhD Student at Caltech working on the early evolution of life on Earth. A love for everything computational. Particularly interested in exploring how computer tools can make our lives as scientists easier and the quality of our science and publications better. Check out a recent project: jetfighter.ecrlife.org

JetFighter
Data and data visualization are key to science. When done wrong, figures can end up with artifactual features or inaccessible to certain readers. JetFighter is a proof-of-concept app that scans the bioRxiv for pre-prints that use rainbow colormaps and sends the authors an email suggesting an improvement. Here there are two key outcomes: More than 95% of emails sent out are looked at by authors (and often responded to with a quick 'thank you'). Rainbow colormaps are still prevalent in the literature. This vignette illustrates the impact automated tools like JetFighter can have on improving the quality of scientific publications.