With the current situation around the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are several initiatives pushing forward to help finding solutions to successfully fight the virus. The global bioinformatics community is pushing its own efforts and organized the virtual COVID-19 Biohackathon. Starting today, contributors are invited to virtually work together on multiple topics and share their results openly via Github.
„The goal of COVID-19-BH20 is to create a cohesive effort and work on tooling for COVID-19 analysis. The biohackathon will lead to more readily accessible data, protocols, detection kits, protein predictions etc. We will also push for policy change where it comes to non-public or hard to access data because we are facing such challenges!“
Konrad had the chance to talk to one of the organizers, Leyla Jael Garcia-Castro, about the idea and implementation of this endeavor. Enjoy!
Ja, es ist schon wieder etwas her und es hat sich mal wieder ein ganzer Sack von News angesammelt. Erstaunlicherweise geht’s in einer Reihe von Themen mal wieder etwas technischer zur Sache, denn wir haben nicht nur ein paar Tools im Gepäck, sondern schweifen auch immer wieder auf technisch getriebene Themen ab – nicht selten mit Bezug zu Konrad’s Haus- und Hofthema, der Bioinformatik. Viel Spaß!
In the world of scientific events conferences are the classic event format. However, there are many others and currently we can see more modern and more open formats evolve – science slams, hackathons, unconferences or unseminars. We have invited two scientists who have initiated unseminars to their scientific surroundings (both in the field of bioinformatics). Natasha Wood organizes an unseminar series in Cape Town, while Aidan Budd is actively involved in an unseminar series in Heidelberg. As our German listeners will know we had Aidan already as a guest and spoke with him about the HUB (Heidelberg Unseminars in Bioinformatics). With this episode we want to widen the horizon, not only by looking to South Africa, but also by doing this episode in English and also touching slightly other topics.
In der Welt der wissenschaftlichen Veranstaltungen treten neben das altehrwürdige Format der wissenschaftlichen Konferenz auch vermehrt „modernere“ und offenere Formate – Science Slams, Hackathons, Unkonferenzen oder Unseminare. Letzteres organisierte Aidan Budd am European Molecular Biology Laboratory mit den Heidelberg Unseminars in Bioinformatics. Also haben wir ihn mal eingeladen um mit uns über dieses offene Format zu sprechen.
Viel Spaß bei dieser Folge!
