Seminari

BioDynaMo: in-silico biomedical simulations coming of age

by Marco Manca (SCimPULSE foundation)

Friday, January 26, 2018 from to (Europe/Rome)
at Sala Asinelli
Description
Computer simulations have been adopted very early in biomedical research, and have been growing in complication as computing power and our ability to generate data have grown. Important socio-technical challenges have nevertheless left the field fragmented, even in the face of large investments, and despite a handful of brilliant success stories.

Can the culture of large distributed collaborations, and the wisdom of business practices shaping the relatively young field of serverless IT come to the rescue?

BioDynaMo is a platform for in-silico developmental biology simulations that aims at smoothing the funnel from ideas to model generation, and at destroying the classical barriers every simulation meets when scaling up from small desktop experiments all the way to the much touted potential real-world impact. 

Leaving optimizations and load balancing to the lower levels of the platform, and enforcing good practices (e.g.: when is the last time you have read a biomedical simulation manuscript commenting on the parameter sensitivity of the model?) in the system, BioDynaMo will allow its users to focus on what they do best: placing dents into the uncertainty associated with biomedical conjectures and models.

The project was born within CERN openlab, an institutional space that for 16 years already has been the sandbox for collision and cooperation between CERN and external parties committed to cutting edge IT related R&I. What can high-energy physics and medicine learn from each other in these first decades of XXI century, and what does BioDynaMo share with the Borgs?
Material:
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