Ascona Workshop 2015

Statistical Learning of Biological Systems from Perturbations

Scope

Advances in biotechnology have made genome-scale measurements routine, including most recent techniques for perturbing individual genes in a targeted manner. These interventional data hold the promise to infer biological networks and to move forward systems biological approaches significantly. A major challenge now is to use the vast amount of data generated from these technologies and to devise appropriate statistical models and computational inference methods. Unlike observational data, interventional data can reveal causal relationships among genes or other biomolecular entities. As such, the statistical analysis and computational integration of perturbation data is an important step towards large-scale biological system identification with abundant applications in biology and medicine.

This workshop will (i) explore recent advances and open problems in statistical learning, data integration, and causal inference of biological systems; (ii) present biomedical applications to recent genome-wide perturbation data, such as RNA interference data, obtained, for example, from cancer cells or cells infected by pathogens; and (iii) facilitate meaningful interaction between biomedical and quantitative researchers.

Date

May 31 to June 5, 2015

Location

Centro Stefano Franscini, Monte Verita, Ascona, Switzerland

Confirmed keynote speakers

• Brenda Andrews, Donnelly Centre
• Roderick Beijersbergen, Netherlands Cancer Institute
• Michael Boutros, DKFZ Heidelberg
• Anne Carpenter, Broad Institute
• Bernd Fischer, EMBL/DKFZ Heidelberg
• Susan Holmes, Stanford
• Marloes Maathuis, ETH Zurich
• George Michailidis, University of Michigan
• Lars Steinmetz, EMBL Heidelberg and Stanford
• Achim Tresch, Max-Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne

Program

Download Schedule (PDF, 77 KB)

Download Abstracts (PDF, 2.6 MB)

Organizing committee

Niko Beerenwinkel, Peter Bühlmann, Darlene Goldstein, Wolfgang Huber

CSF sponsored award

The Congressi Stefano Franscini sponsors an award to a young scientists for the best presentation at the conference. The award corresponds to the sum of 500 CHF, together with a certificate and a small CSF memento, and will be formally presented to the winner before the end of the conference. This year, it was awarded to Chenchen Zhu from EMBL Heidelberg.

Sponsoring

• Swiss National Science Foundation
• Centro Stefano Franscini
• Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
• Contact Group for Research Matters (KGF - Kontaktgruppe für Forschungsfragen)