On Saturday 3 September 2016, Morris Swertz and Lude Franke from University Medical Centre Groningen will organise a workshop on how to use existing datasets to gain novel scientific insight. The workshop is part of the programme of the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2016).
Workshop details
Date: 3 September 2016
Time: 9:00 – 17:00
Venue: World Forum, room: t.b.c.
Summary
Many exciting avenues exist now for computational biologists because of an exponential growth of biological datasets. Although a lot of data is already publicly available, including gene expression data, other types of data are often not. However, many efforts are currently ongoing to make other sets of data (such as genotype data, metabolite or proteomics data) available to other researchers, using controlled access repositories such as dbGAP and EGA. Additionally, international efforts such as the Biobanking and BioMolecular resources research infrastructure (BBMRI) and the distributed infrastructure for life-science information (ELIXIR) aim to connect different biobanks, enabling research on even larger datasets.
The workshop aims to give an overview of the many exciting datasets that currently exist, how to get access to them and what scientific insight can be derived when using such data.
Target audience
Computational biologists are often faced with limits in the amount of data at their disposal to apply or test their algorithms. This workshop is targeted to those researchers who are interested to learn how to best apply and test their algorithms on the large numbers of datasets that are now (publicly) available. This workshop is a combination of talks regarding what is available in various databases, how it is possible to get access to the data inside these databases and examples of how researchers have obtained novel scientific insight by doing so. This workshop therefore has both an educational component but will also have a scientific component to it, to attract an audience as broad as possible.
Please find more information on the ECCB 2016 website.