2024-11-05 05:33:34
The 9th Big Data Forum for Life and Health Sciences & the 21st Asian Bioinformatics Consortium (ABC) Symposium was successfully held in Beijing, China from October 16th to 18th, 2024. The forum was hosted by Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (BIG, CAS) / China National Center for Bioinformation (CNCB), undertaken by the National Genomics Data Center (NGDC) and the Global Biodiversity and Health Big Data Alliance (BHBD), and supported by the Alliance of National and International Science Organizations for the Belt and Road Regions (ANSO). A total of 36 invited speakers from 8 countries including China, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Pakistan, UK, USA and Uzbekistan gave presentations, with over 200 researchers and students participated in the forum. Mr. Shizhuan Zhang, Deputy Executive Director of ANSO Secretariat, attended the conference.
Prof. Yiming Bao, Director of NGDC and Chairperson of the BHBD Council, gave a report on the database resources of NGDC, and also introduced the background and activities of BHBD, wishing to enhance the international cooperation and communication on biodiversity and health big data through BHBD network.
The topics of the forum covered a variety of areas including data integration and curation, computational methods and AI models, genomics for precision medicine, RNA (single-cell) omics, and biodiversity and health genomics. For example, Dr. Alex Bateman from European Bioinformatics Institute gave a keynote on the advancements of AI in protein family classification and structure prediction. Prof. Xuegong Zhang from Tsinghua University elaborated the development and perspective from big data, large foundation models to digital life. Dr. Michael Galperin from National Center of Biotechnology Information, USA reported the updates of the COG (Clusters of Orthologous Genes) database. Two representatives of BHBD members (Prof. Balázs Győrffy, HUN-REN Research Center for Natural Sciences, Hungary; Prof. Amir Ali Abbasi, Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan) also gave presentations and shared their featured resource and research progress.
The Big Data Forum for Life and Health Sciences has been held annually by BIG, CAS/CNCB since 2016. The ABC symposium is organized jointly by NGDC in China, KOBIC in Korea, and DDBJ in Japan, and hosted by NGDC in China this year. The events have contributed to the promotion of knowledge exchanges and sharing on biodiversity and health big data among global researchers, as well as the expansion of BHBD networks for future international collaborations.