Workshops

MMBioS workshops provide hands-on and state-of-the-art training in topics related to our Technology Research & Development projects and other expertise present within MMBioS participants.  These workshops are aimed at both experimental and computational scientists, and promote collaboration between the groups.

The workshops fall into three different categories:

Application workshops focus on a specific topic derived from one of the TR&D projects, such as cellular modeling, molecular modeling, or bioimage processing. Typical in-person workshops have 20 -25 participants selected from a large pool of applicants at various levels (students, postdocs or professionals from academia and industry) and 3 to 5 instructors.  In the on-line format we are able to accept between 80-100 participants and 20-25 instructors will be available to help the participants.  Instructors are MMBioS investigators specialized in the subject area and external experts when appropriate.  The workshops include lectures and focused hands-on sessions in the computer lab.   Participants use the hands-on sessions to work on prepared tutorials or their own research projects.  Participants also have opportunities to interact directly with MMBioS personnel to discuss research questions and to map out potential strategies.

Research workshops bring together a group of 15 -20 computational and/or experimental scientists to discuss in depth a specific area of biomedical research, including the progress made in that area and alternative approaches to meeting new challenges.  The workshops are organized in different ways:

  • Informal meetings among the leading computational groups in research areas relevant to the scientific and technological goals of MMBioS, to discuss topics such as the development of novel methods, common protocols, interoperability of software tools, and quality control.
  • Brainstorming sessions between researchers from different disciplines to discuss which computational or quantitative methods need to be developed or improved to advance an area of biomedical interest or to facilitate translational research.
  • Discussions on how to integrate HPC infrstructure and tools into a given area of computational biomedicine, leveraging PSC's expertise as well as the advances made in other Biomedical Techoloty Research Centers.

Technology workshops are targeted mostly at the biological and biomedical computational community, and train participants in the application of HPC and emerging technologies to the computer algorithms and codes.  Topics include large-scale image registration, visualization technology, parallel programming, code optimization techniques to acheive massive parallelism on state-of-the-art supercomputers, and use of emerging technologies like General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) and FPGAs to accelerate biomedical codes.  The workshops are joint initiatives between MMBioS and PSC scientists.

Facilities

Our workshops are held in a dedicated state-of-the-art facility at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.  The training space includes a lecture hall equipped with a 3D projection system and an adjacent computer lab with powerful workstations attached to LCD monitors and a projection system.

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