The IGB Center for Artificial Intelligence and Modeling (CAIM) is organizing a monthly working group to facilitate the matching of biological problems to quantitative methods. A preliminary non-exhaustive list of biological topics that we have been planning to discuss is:
- Single-cell and Spatial transcriptomics"
- Biomolecular networks in space and time explored using single-cell biophysics
- Microbiome dynamics and methods for control
- Cancer genomics
The working group will meet in IGB 612 from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm on the following Mondays. Some meetings will be help jointly with the IGB Spatial Omics Initiative.
1/30/23 (joint with Spatial Omics)
2/27/23 (joint with Spatial Omics)
3/27/23
4/24/23
The structure we have in mind is as follows:
1. Each session will consist of three 15 minute talks, followed by a general discussion.
2. Each session will be dedicated to either all biological or all analytical topics alternating each month.
3. The purpose of the biological talks will be to introduce biological questions, problems, and datasets, so that the analytical participants can recommend suitable quantitative tools.
4. The purpose of the analytical talks will be to introduce analytical tools suitable for answering the quantitative questions formulated in the biological talks.
Our hope is that through this alternating discussion, biological and analytical attendees will begin to develop a common vocabulary and shared concepts that might ultimately lead to a productive collaboration. To make this process easier, we recommend the following guidelines for preparing talks:
Biological talks should contain:
- a description of the biological problem of interest,
- a description of the dataset(s) generated by their lab, and
- a review of the previous work emphasizing successes and limitations of the existing analytical approaches to the problem.
Analytical talks should contain:
- a description of the quantitative question being answered,
- an illustration of its application to an existing biological dataset, and
- a discussion of how it might be applied to biological problem or problems introduced in previous talks.
We encourage graduate students from both biological and analytical research groups to attend these seminars, to present the work done in their labs, and to participate in collective discussions; this will be a fantastic opportunity to learn how to work with a diverse group of collaborators.