Hello,
I want to preface this by saying I understand this is an irregular question and that the Hail community and its developers are busy. We appreciate you taking the time to read our request.
Our group at the University of Michigan recently released “SECRET-GWAS,” a confidential computing solution for collaborative GWAS. Our open-source tool takes large inspiration from Hail’s ability to deploy on cloud clusters, ease of use, and the Hail file format. We even created a small mock demo showing how our system can use Hail for filtering/QC, and our new secure backend for collaborative GWAS.
Our work is currently under peer review for publication, and we are considering the next steps. Our goal is to improve the usability, features, etc. of our tool so that it can be more widely adopted and maybe in the future even have official integration/support with a popular GWAS framework like Hail. While our currently supported functionality is small compared to Hail, we have recruited a few students specifically to aid in development.
My question is this: if we want our secure collaborative GWAS system to be more widely used what are the essential features we need to support? If Hail would ever consider supporting integration with an external collaborative GWAS tool what requirements would need to be met? Of course, we can provide developers from our lab to meet the needs of the Hail team.
Thank you again for considering our request,
Jonah