bioinfoRmatics v2

Based on the very positive feedback on the previous R meetup, we are hosting another session dedicated to bioinformatics and life sciences, and I am very much looking forward to meeting you all on April 16!

• Although we already have 5 lightning talks scheduled, if you are interested in giving a 5-15 mins talk (freestyle, either in Hungarian or English), please let us know.
• If you are not willing to speak this time -- no worries; please join us for the talks and the networking event afterward.

Schedule:

• 18:00 doors open
• 18:15 talks @ N15 101 (1st floor)
• 19:30 networking (pizza, soft drinks) @ N13 Panorama Lounge (7th floor)
• 20:30 end of meetup, optionally walking to a nearby pub

Please note that there will be another event happening in the building at the same time, so make sure to arrive on time between 18:00 and 18:15 to N15 101, from where we will together go up to the Panorama Lounge/rooftop after the talks. Late attendees will not be able to join, sorry!

List of planned talks:

• Kristof Kelemen: Hungarian Forest Reserves Shiny app

We wanted to make point-based data from forest reserves publicly available. I will talk about the difficulties of presenting multivariate spatial data and discuss further plans to make the site better. The app can be visited at https://hunforres.shinyapps.io/hunforres

• Tibor Nagy (MATE): When NOT to use R

R is a good language for many purposes, but sometimes we need to use something else. In this presentation, I will show use cases when not using R is more efficient.

• Tamás Hegedűs (Semmelweis): 3D-bioinformatics in the AlphaFold era

DeepMind's AlphaFold revolutionized the field by accurately predicting protein structures from sequences, solving a decades-old challenge. This breakthrough has not only made high-quality structures of all known proteins, but also significantly advanced protein design and drug development. The impactful journey of DeepMind tools will be encapsulated through relatable, everyday examples (e.g. https://alphamissense.hegelab.org).

• Teadora Tyler (Semmelweis): CellChat: predicting cell-to-cell communication in single cell RNAseq data

The data generated by single cell RNA sequencing in a gold mine. Recently, several packages were developed for predicting cell-to-cell communication pathways based on large databases of known ligand-receptor pairs. CellChat is a user-friendly package with innovative graphic solutions compatible with widely used single cell pipelines.

• Gergely Daroczi (Rx Studio): LLM for dosing suggestions?

Rx Studio's background and the main precision dosing webapp for clinicians was briefly presented at a previous R meetup, but with the recent AI/LLM hype and related investor expectations, we piloted a patient-facing chat application for assisting paracetamol dosing. This talk will share some of the related concerns and experiences, and how we managed to build a chat MVP after heavily regulating LLM functionalities.

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This meetup is co-organized with DS&ME, and kindly hosted by CEU. Food (pizza) and drinks will be served onsite after the talks, and we will also make table reservations in a nearby pub after 9.00 pm.