BioTransR Conference

Several members from the Data Science Institute attended the BrioTransR conference in Barcelona, Spain as part of the eTRIKS annual meeting.

From the 15^th to the 16^th of May, several members of the DSI attended and presented at the BioTransR conference in Barcelona, Spain. The BioTransR conference is organized by the IMI funded project eTRIKS, which provides collaborative research projects with advice, service and a data management platform. The platforms and tools built by eTRIKS allows for data visualization and analysis without needing the expertise of a data scientist-the DSI developed the eTRIKS harmonization tool which enhances the efficiency of data curators in transforming data and applying standards. The BioTransR conference was organized to help bring data scientists together and translational researchers and has two main themes: understanding the landscape of Bioinformatics infrastructure and 

how to reduce fragmentation, and giving Translational Researchers the knowledge and the tools they need to collaborate on making sense of Translational Research data faster.  During the BioInformatics and Translational Research Scenario’s section of the conference, several researchers from the DSI presented, as well as the head of the DSI, Professor Yike Guo. Prof. Guo gave a talk entitled: “How an integrated platform can be used to take us ‘Beyond the inflection point’ and towards precision medicine”.

Prof. Guo’s talk was followed by Dr. Ibrahim Emam and Dr. Stelios Pavlidis from the DSI. Dr. Emam discussed his research on standards based study design and curation, while Dr. Pavlidis presented his work about “applying data tools to enhance disease stratification: U-BIOPRED data project”.

Dr. Kai Sun, Axel Oehmichen and Florian Guitton from the DSI also presented their ideas for the evolution of eTRIKS and TransMART.

The BioTransR conference included training sessions on CDISC, TransMART 17.1 Data model &Rest API programming, and a data curation workshop. Overall, the BioTransR conference was a great success and more details, as well as videos, of the event will be available shortly through the eTRIKs Data Science Network (eDSN).