The Artificial Intelligence Workbench: a retrospective review

Abstract

Last decade, biomedical and bioinformatics researchers have been demanding advanced and user-friendly applications for real use in practice. In this context, the Artificial Intelligence Workbench, an open-source Java desktop application framework for scientific software development, emerged with the goal of provid-ing support to both fundamental and applied research in the domain of transla-tional biomedicine and bioinformatics. AIBench automatically provides function-alities that are common to scientific applications, such as user parameter defini-tion, logging facilities, multi-threading execution, experiment repeatability, work-flow management, and fast user interface development, among others. Moreover, AIBench promotes a reusable component based architecture, which also allows assembling new applications by the reuse of libraries from existing projects or third-party software. Ten years have passed since the first release of AIBench, so it is time to look back and check if it has fulfilled the purposes for which it was conceived to and how it evolved over time.