Meet your peers discussion sessions

Moderators: Yannis Nevers, Silvia Prieto-Baños

Room: Workshop 1 - Congress Centre

Structural genome annotation is the process of identifying coding and non-coding elements on a genome. This process is critical to make sense and make use of genomic data but thus far lacks agreed upon standards and is still technically difficult for eukaryotic genomes.

In this session, we will lead the discussion about state-of-the-art in eukaryotic genome annotation and the main challenges it currently faces. We will touch upon the emerging format and quality standards in the community - including recent developments and contributions from major sequencing initiatives. Finally, we will turn the spotlight on the effect of genome annotation on downstream analyses, and share experiences on how to better reduce such technical bias.

Moderators: Marija Buljan, Aurélie Gabriel

Room: Workshop 5 - Congress Centre

Cellular signaling pathways determine cell identity, its response to stimuli and its function both in homeostasis and disease. Even though targeting of cellular pathways is of a high pharmaceutical interest, their comprehensive mapping represents a formidable challenge due to the complexity in signal transduction regulation. In particular, wiring of pathway components is often specific for individual cell types and their functional states. In this session, we want to discuss useful multi-omics datasets, data repositories as well as computational approaches that investigate gene regulatory processes induced by changes in chromatin accessibility, assess kinase signaling cascades and build up on the network inference approaches, which can all be used for the better mapping and understanding of cellular signaling routes.

Moderators: Jonas Grossmann, Katja Bärenfaller

Room: Vereinsaal - Congress Centre

In which direction is the field of proteomics currently developing? How far away are we from getting a complete view on the proteome also considering subproteomes and proteoforms? What aspects are we still missing? How do we move away from 'unbiased cherry picking' in standard approaches? Do we still need bulk proteomics or should we focus more on single-cell proteomics? What research questions can we ask, and what is not possible to answer with the current technologies?

In this interactive “Meet your peers” discussion, we encourage participants to share their expertise and insights on these topics, and to reflect on their experiences, unsuccessful approaches, and potential pitfalls. Additionally, we are keen to hear your thoughts on the developments you would like to see for the proteomics field in the near or distant future.

Moderators: Geert van Geest, Diana Marek

Room: Ginger 1 - Courtyard Mariott Hotel

Do you consider education as an important part of science? Have you ever struggled to re-use educational material? Did you know that the FAIR* principles can be applied to training and education? Do you know what SIB is doing in this area?

In this “Meet your peers“ discussion, learn how the FAIR principles can support education and training. Discover how SIB efforts can be leveraged in this process and discuss ways in which the FAIRification process could be improved and more easily used in education.

This session welcomes anyone involved in education at universities or within institutes in any way (learners, occasional lecturers, teachers) and/or who is interested in open and FAIR education.

During this interactive discussion, the attendees will share their knowledge and ideas of what FAIR in education means. In addition, it will give them guidance on how to re-use existing material and how to apply the FAIR principles to their own education process.

*Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Those principles are important to stimulate open and reproducible science.

Moderator(s): Philipp Bucher

Room: Restaurant - Congress Centre

This event is organized by the SIB Epigenomics focus group. Discussion topics may include:

(i) interoperability issues (semantic and computational): metadata, ontologies, format standards, federated queries;
(ii) reproducibility and re-usability: workflow sharing, containerization, data longevity, visualization;
(iii) community aspects: Dissemination channels (journals and data repositories), legal aspects, authorship, incentives, role of bioinformatics core facilities, teaching needs.

The intent is to address these questions in a broad context, not limited to epigenomics. We hope to be able to attract a balanced mix of data producers, users and brokers with different background.

Moderators: Robert Waterhouse

Room: Workshop 2 - Congress Centre

The integration of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) policies and best practices into institutional governance structures is increasingly recognised as essential for community cohesion and belonging. As a federated institution, the SIB connects members from many different institutions across Switzerland. In this session, we aim to share SIB Members experiences and understanding of their own institution's EDI initiatives. The goal is to create a map of the status of SIB-affiliates' activities in the domain as a means of cross-pollinating ideas amongst institutions. Emerging from this, we hope to also develop a clearer picture of how the SIB can best serve the needs of SIB Members with respect to EDI integration

Moderators: Remy Bruggmann, Robert Ivanek, Michael Stadler

Room: Cinnamon - Courtyard Mariott Hotel

The "Core Facilities Focus Group" provides a collaborative platform for members of SIB core facilities to exchange experiences and best practices. Alongside topics specific to facilities, like project management, time tracking, and financial models, we also address broader challenges in bioinformatics. This encompasses standardizing data analysis, developing and sharing workflows, and promoting reproducible research. With many institutes adopting embedded bioinformaticians, fostering regular interaction between them and core facilities, and integrating them into the SIB bioinformatics community belongs to our main focus. It serves as a dynamic forum for optimizing processes and sharing knowledge within and beyond bioinformatics cores.

Moderators: Santiago Carmona, Julien Roux

Room: Juniper - Courtyard Mariott Hotel

Launched in November 2022, the Single-cells Omics focus group organizes hybrid meetings every first Wednesday of the month, aiming at discussing various topics connected to single-cell data analysis and visualization.

This session will be the opportunity to meet in real life with members of the group, and with people interested in joining us. We are planning an informal discussion allowing us to get a better idea of who is working on what type of single cell data at the moment, and collect the topics people would like to hear about in the upcoming meetings.

This session aims at fostering connections between attendees who have interest in the development of single-cell omics technologies.

Moderators: Marc Robinson Rechavi

Room: Workshop 3 - Congress Centre

While scientists as a community sound the alarm about climate change and biodiversity collapse, individual scientists and labs continue to have a large environmental impact. This includes plane travel and, for bioinformatics especially, the carbon footprint of computations.
We will discuss how to balance the environmental footprint of our work with the needs of scientific research and bioinformatics support.

Moderators: Marie-Claude Blätter, Monique Zahn

Room: Ginger 2 - Courtyard Mariott Hotel

Are you passionate about science and want to share it with others? Do you think more scientists should be speaking up about societal issues that can be impacted by their science? Would you like to improve the SIB outreach activities? Would you like to be involved in some way in the SIB's outreach activities?

If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, this ‘meet your peers’ session is for you.

Over the years, SIB has developed websites (chromosomewalk.ch, lightofevolution.org, ohmygenes.org, drug-designworkshop.ch) and related interactive workshops which are available to teachers, students, as well as the public. The topics covered (genes & proteins, evolution, drug design) allow a public of all ages to discover a wide range of tools and databases developed by the SIB, how they are being used by researchers around the world to answer questions that have an impact on society.

In 2023, 2'300 people participated in more than 120 workshops organized and/or animated by the SIB, in classrooms, during events such as TecDays (by SATW), open days (Mystères de l'UNIL), science fairs (Nuit de la Science), events dedicated to young girls (Enlarge your Horizon) or career orientation programs.

Come and discuss with like-minded peers at SIB how you can communicate with the public!

Moderators: Alex Kanitz, Mark Ibberson, Michael Baudis, Lucy Poveda

Room: Konzertsaal - Congress Centre

The discussion introduces SIB members to community standards and pan-European infrastructure projects for large scale data storage and analytics as well as sensitive data handling with application to biomedical research and personalized medicine. While it is primarily geared towards managers and administrators of computing and data centers and those SIB members that already contribute or would like to contribute in the future to relevant European and/or international organizations, initiatives or projects (e.g., ELIXIR, EOSC, FEGA, GA4GH, RDA), it will address trending topics for anyone involved in the acquisition, governance, and processing of large data volumes, obtained, e.g., through sequencing, mass spectrometry or imaging techniques.