Grand Challenges Symposium

This year, our Grand Challenges Symposium focuses on "The challenges of big data - From biologists to becoming data scientists"

Advancements in modern technology have led to a rapid growth in the size and number of datasets available for scientific research. In order to handle this flood of data, there has been a shift in the emphasis of current research from mere data aggregation to advanced techniques in data processing and analysis. In ethology, for example, the increasing quantity of data is driving the development of novel representations of animal posture dynamics spanning both spatial and temporal aspects. The increasing frequency of computational biological fields poses a new hurdle to biologists: the transition from being a biologist to also becoming a data scientist. To keep up with current advances, biologists have to be increasingly aware of the trends in, for instance, computer vision, machine/deep learning, modeling frameworks, or data mining. But what are the pitfalls when handling big data? How can we assess complex computer science-driven approaches without having a background in computer science? How can we acquire this knowledge and also communicate our findings to peers, grant agencies, and the broader public in a comprehensible way? With the apparent need to become a "Renaissance (wo)man", we would like to address these and other questions over the course of our annual Grand Challenges Symposium, to help biologists understand the skills necessary for handling the growing influence of data science in their fields.

We are very pleased and honoured to announce the following keynote speakers:
-Tanya Berger-Wolf (Ohio State University, USA)
- Patricia Soranno (Michigan State University, USA)
- Bart Kranstauber (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)