curATalk Heinz Handels - 16.01.2025
AI in Medical Image Computing
16.01.2025, 5:00 - 5:45 PM
Department of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Image and Signal Processing, DFKI Lübeck
Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Lübeck
Interdisciplinary hacking, problem solving and networking: Everyone is welcome - with and without programming skills and at all career levels! 5 challenges are waiting for you: Take a look at the descriptions: curahack-challenges-2025.pdf
A mentor will be at your and your team's side during the hackathon. The best team wins a prize!
Register here free of charge and choose a challenge, we look forward to seeing you!
When: 10.03.2025 9:00 - 17:15 Uhr
Audience: PhD students, early Postdocs
Where: University Medical Center Mainz, Building 708
Registration: Send this form to [javascript protected email address]
Take the unique opportunity and participate in one of the two workshops and at our panel discussion! At the discussion, you will have the chance to learn about various career options and paths by our curATime cluster members and you will get personal and inspiring insights.
Workshop 1: The art of engaging small talk
Workshop 2: Transferable Skills for your Career
Panel Discussion:
Life Science Zentrum Mainz (LZM): Christina tom Suden
AI Start-up/ Industry: tba
BioNTech: XiaoXing Qing
Young Group Leader/Academia: tba
The curATalk lecture series was created in 2021 in order to connect the scientists that are involved in curATime as well as thematically closely related scientist and their research. This virtual meeting takes place at regular intervals and presents their latest research findings and topics that provide additional scientific value for the individual curATime projects. The curATalks are announced publicly and enjoy lively participation from a broad audience.
“Translating Research into Therapies” was the motto of our first cluster conference on February 6th, which brought together all cluster stakeholders to discuss current research issues and results in a relaxed atmosphere.
External experts from a variety of fields such as translational research, AI, thrombosis research and sustainability in science not only gave our members fresh perspectives with their presentations, but also expanded our network. In addition, renowned speakers from politics and BMBF representatives once again highlighted the importance of our cluster and reinforced our joint mission.
Afterwards, our lighthouse projects were presented within short presentations and all of our other curATime projects were discussed intensively during the poster session - a very good opportunity to strengthen personal contacts within the cluster.
Our conference day ended by handing out the “curAEquality” award: we awarded special research achievements in the field of gender and diversity for the first time. The winner, Romina Wolz, who is currently working on her doctoral thesis at the Center for Thrombosis and Haemostasis at the University Medical Center Mainz, received the award for her curATime sub-project “Role of macrophage coagulation signaling in atherosclerosis”.
Postersession at the curAMeet 2024
Innovate the future of Life Science and Medicine
curAHack has brought together young scientists, bioinformaticians and healthcare-enthusiasts to tackle research challenges from the curATime cluster. With guidance from mentors and experts, participants have developed innovative solutions presented their ideas to a jury at the end of the event. More information about the challenges and the event itself can be found here.
The mentors of the three challenges draw an enthusiastic conclusion:
"Team 1 , "curAGUI" was required to create a GUI that was able to implement all of the placeholder scripts provided in order to further on be able to replace them with trained deep learning models. The team was able to develop a basic framework that meant to envelop all of the required points and integrated videos in a manner that would mimic the results of the pipeline."
Aida Romano Martínez, University Medical Center Mainz
"During the hackathon, two teams worked on an RNA-seq analysis pipeline that should not require any gene annotation information for initial analysis. Both teams were able to conduct exploratory analysis to quantify the effect of different ensemble gene annotation models. As a solution, both teams came up with k-mer count tables as an intermediate result file that can later be mapped to any gene annotation.
While one team, the "Bioinformagicians", established an analysis pipeline using existing tools that they cleverly selected and adapted for the intended use, the other team, the "Expressionists", developed a novel analysis from scratch. The Bioinformagicians ultimately won the hackathon with a combined analysis that could be the basis for the development of novel expression pipeline for RNA-seq data. We will summarize all results and findings in a preprint and make all data, code, and analysis available as public repository and on a preprint server."
Dr. David Weber, TRON gGmbH
"The Hackathon challenge “Target Sequence for RNA delivery” was tackled by the team “CurApollo13” that aimed to identify peptide sequences that could enable targeted delivery of nanoparticles to endothelial cells within atherosclerotic lesions. Without any prior knowledge or computational resources, the team came up with two creative and yet complementary concepts. One approach involved analysis of 3D protein structures of paratope/epitope pairs.
In a second approach, the CurApollo13-team provided a concept wherein 3D structures of random short peptide sequences could be computationally predicted using AlphaFold, a powerful computational method that can simulate 3D protein structures. Conceptually, these putative structures could be superimposed on to antigens to test their putative binding. In principle, the first approach could be used to validate the second, fully computational approach. Team CurApollo13 finished as the runners-up of the curAHack."
Dr. Johnny Kim, TRON gGmbH
curAHack 2024 at the Gutenberg Digital Hub at the Zollhafen Mainz.