Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

February 7-11, 2023

KAUST Hotel

The organizing committee listed below brings you the BioHackathon Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 2023 for bioinformatics experts. This will be a great opportunity to collaborate with researchers and field professionals. We encourage women to participate

Organizing Committee

• The Bio-Ontologies Research Group (BORG)  (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)
• Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)
• Women to Impact (WTI) team (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)
• Prof. Dr. Michel Dumontier (Maastricht University, the Netherlands)
• Dr. Leyla Jael Garcia Castro (ZB MED, Germany)
• Dr. Toshiyaki Katayama (DBCLS, Japan)
• Dr. Mona Alshahrani (SDAIA, Saudi Arabia)
• Mr. Nagarajan Kathiresan (Supercomputing, KAUST, Saudi Arabia)

BioHackathon events involve a large number of people that meet on-site to discuss ideas and implement projects in a collaborative manner during intensive coding sessions.

The Bio-Hackathon-MENA Objectives

• Stimulate and strengthen the synergy in the bioinformatics community within the MENA region and beyond.
• Engage women in the bioinformatics field inside and outside the MENA region to work together on topics of common interest.
• Facilitate the development of open-source bioinformatics tools and new methods for biomedical data analysis to accelerate scientific innovations and discoveries.

Outcomes of the Bio-Hackathon-MENA

• Bioinformatics workflows, pipelines, scripts, software, and resources developed during the event will be added to public repositories such as GitHub.
• The selected projects will be invited to submit their manuscripts to the Journal of BioMedical Semantics (JBMS) for peer-reviewing. The pre-print versions of the manuscripts will be published in BioHackrXiv 

Bio-Hackathon Topics

Topics for this years Bio-Hackathon are listed below.

• Data and text mining (with focus on Middle East)
• Interoperable resources, databases, ontologies (with focus on Middle East)
• Reproducible workflows for data analysis and interpretation (with focus on Middle East)
• Bioinformatics software
• Machine learning and AI methods

Registration

Registrations are closed.

Projects for BioHackathon MENA 2023

List and descriptions of all projects can be found in our Github repository (opens a new tab)

• Project 1: Toward the treatment of Vaso-Occlusive Crisis: A Reinforcement learning-based approach for non-opioid drug discover
• Project 2: A reproducible workflow using Nextflow for protein Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations with documentation that supports RTL languages and non-Latin scripts.
• Project 3: Embedding ontologies
• Project 4: End to end framework to enable analyzing data from DNA sequencing experiments utilizing AI
• Project 5: DNApredict
• Project 6: Improving prokaryotic genome annotation through an interoperable and multi-platform bioinformatic pipeline.
• Project 7: MetaboliteNET: building a metabolite centric knowledge base by ontology-based mining annotations from literature
• Project 8: Open MENA Microbiome Project
• Project 9: The Middle East molecular database
• Project 10: Reproducing Machine Learning and AI methods using FAIR Workbench
• Project 11: Diabetes Atlas for MENA
• Project 12: Bacteria sensing in wastewater treatment processes using transformer models
• Project 13: Document similarity of articles in the bio-medical domain using multilabel-classification and ontology embeddings.
• Project 14: The ELIXIR::GA4GH Cloud - Global Engagement
• Project 15: Genome workflows and resources for the MENA population
• Project 16: Metadata for Science with (bio)schemas

For more information, please visit https://cbrcconferences.kaust.edu.sa/bio-hackathon-2023
For any questions, please contact the Organizing Committee on (biohackathon@kaust.edu.sa)