BHBD Secretariat 2023-12-08 05:13:35
The 8th Big Data Forum for Life and Health Sciences was recently held in Beijing, China from October 18th to 20th, 2023. 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). Over 200 researchers from 9 countries including Brazil, China, France, Japan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Singapore, UK, and USA participated 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 topic of the forum covered a variety of areas such as biodiversity, database, diseases, and omics. For example, Prof. Jun Yu, former Vice Director of BIG, summarized the progress of the recent 20 years after the Human Genome Project and proposed future perspectives. Dr. Guy Cochrane, Executive Director of the Global Biodata Coalition (GBC), introduced GBC for a sustainable biodata infrastructure. Prof. Yasukazu Nakamura from the National Institute of Genetics, Japan reported the updates from the DNA Data Bank of Japan.
Three BHBD member representatives (Prof. Ana Tereza Ribeiro de Vasconcelos, National Laboratory of Scientific Computation Bioinformatics Laboratory, Brazil; Prof. Sofia Kossida, University of Montpellier, France; Associate Prof. Amjad Ali, National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan) and other 20 more experts from home and abroad 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 since 2016. 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.