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Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology

2021 Online BLIZ in Multidisciplinary Research and Synthesis

Online BLIZ Summer School 2021

Multidisciplinary Research and Synthesis

Mondays from 21st June – 12th July 2021

The summer school will introduce advanced computational techniques for collaborative, multidisciplinary and synthetic research to graduate students of both empirical and modeling background from various fields. The main focus will be to provide the computational skill set for graduate students to start multi-party projects, manage and synthesize multidisciplinary research involving collaborative partners with diverse scientific background. This summer school is an initiative of the BLIZ consortium within the Bayklif network and it is set to be an important stage to ignite and spark hands down integrative work within the Bayklif network. Originally planned to take place at the CCTB, University of Würzburg, it is now completely online due to the covid-19 restrictions.

The summer school will take place online in 5 days spread out along 5 weeks starting 21st June, with 1 full day per week (Mondays). Both morning and afternoon sessions will encompass lecture and practical components. The first four weeks will cover themes providing important skills for collaborative research and data/model exploration. In the first week, the students will be asked to provide poster presentations of their research and in the second week they will be grouped in teams encompassing different backgrounds to start discussing joint project ideas. The skills learned along the course should then be applied to their projects during the group meeting sessions. This summer school intends to ultimately foment the multidisciplinary work and to prepare graduate students to professional environment as postdocs able to interact with collaboration partners with different background, to active participate in workshops and synthesis research. Lectures and practical work will be given by invited experts in computational tools and research synthesis. The last day will include a symposium for the groups to present their projects. The day topics are:

1) Modern practices in open science and collaborative research: 2.1) git version control, git lab (lecture and exercises: Andreas Knote, Human-Computer Interaction Department, University of Würzburg); 2.2) Rmarkdown, reproducible environments, computational notebooks (lecture and exercises: Dr. Francisco Rodríguez-Sánchez, University of Sevilla; Ludmilla Figueiredo, IZW Berlin and University of Würzburg); 2.3) R packages (lecture/exercises: Selina Balauf, Free University of Berlin, https://selinazitrone.github.io/YoMos2020/how_to.html)

2) Advanced and interactive computational programming in R (lecture and exercises: Dr. Cédric Scherer, IZW Berlin): 1.1) basic to advanced data visualization in ggplot; 1.2) interactive html tools and graphics 

3) Machine Learning: 3.1) interpretable ML (lecture and exercises: Christoph Molnar, Giuseppe Casalicchio, Julia Herbinger, LMU); 3.2) Different aspects of machine learning (lecture and exercises: Dr. Ing. Anna Krause, Dr. Markus Ankenbrand, University of Würzburg) 

4) Research synthesis: 4.1) heterogeneous data integration, imperfect detection (Dr. Diana Bowler, iDiv, sMon); 4.2) synthesis working groups (Dr. Marten Winter, iDiv, sDiv) 

The 5th day will be devoted to 5.1) pitch multidisciplinary ideas emerging from the  groups to integrate the models and/or data within the group participants and to 5.2) present the ideas in a symposium.

Organization: Prof. Dr. Juliano Sarmento Cabral (BLIZ TP II) and Mona Reiß

Lectures and exercise will take place via zoom, with group meetings and social programe happening in gathertown

Check also the summer school in BLIZ homepage.