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upcoming events

Conference: 5th NEUBIAS Conference 2023

5th NEUBIAS Conference 2023

Defragmentation Training School & Open Symposium

Date

Venue

Description

8-12 May, 2023

Porto, Portugal

The Defragmentation Training School 2 is addressed to the new generation of bioimage analysts and will take place from the 8th to the 12th of May 2023. The training school is supported by EOSC-Life, Euro-BioImaging, AI4Life and i3S.

The Open Symposium will start on Thursday the 11th of May and will focus on recent scientific developments and open tools in bioimage analysis. There will be a special session for AI4Life, covering Deep Learning-related topics.

More information about the Defragmentation Training School can be found here and the Open Symposium here.

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upcoming events

Workshop: Euro-BioImaging’s Guide to FAIR bioimage data

Euro-BioImaging’s Guide to FAIR bioimage data

Date

Venue

Description

 

 

 

March 28, 2023, 2pm – 5pm CEST (see in your local time)

Online

Wondering how to make the most out of your bioimaging data?

Join us for a free, online workshop that will introduce the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles, focusing on their implementation for bioimaging data.

Speakers will include representatives from Euro-BioImaging, BioImage Archive, the AI4Life project, and more … Our special guest, Katrín Möller, a post-doctoral researcher at Biomedical Center of the University of Iceland, will share her personal story of depositing her microglia dataset on the BioImage Archive.

Contact information

 

Find more information in Euro-BioImaging’s LinkedIn event.

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News

Celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science

Celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science

Milan, 11 February 2023

At the recent Hackathon “Deep Learning in Fiji”, organized by AI4Life and Global Bioimaging at the Human Technopole, several talented and accomplished women engineers made their mark.

As the world celebrated the International Day of Women and Girls in Science during the Hackathon, we took the opportunity to highlight the contributions of the female participants to the hackathon. Read below their trajectories and accomplishments.

Caterina Fuster-Barceló

Caterina is a post-doctoral researcher immersed in AI4Life with Dr Arrate Muñoz Barrutia. In December 2022, she defended a PhD in Computer Science and Technology with a cum-laude mention obtained at Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), Spain, under the supervision of Dr Pedro Peris and Dr Carmen Cámara. She possesses a BSc in Telematics Engineering from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) and an MSc in Cybersecurity for the UC3M. One of her great passions is sharing the knowledge she obtained these last years with different communities. For this reason, she is participating in Skype A Scientist and has explained her thesis to people from different backgrounds at different conferences that you will find on her website.

Hackathons are a great opportunity to meet personally who you are working with. Being able to talk and work face to face is a rich experience that sometimes we forget how important it is. So glad that I have met those amazing people from all around the globe to share knowledge, skills and drinks!
Caterina Fuster-Barceló

Estibaliz is a mathematician by training and an expert in biomedical image analysis. She did her PhD at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) with Prof. Arrate Muñoz-Barrutia and Prof. Denis Wirtz on the study of 3D cancer cell motility. Currently, she’s an EMBO postdoctoral fellow within the group of Prof. Ricardo Henriques at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Portugal. She is heavily involved in the bioimage analysis community, more particularly in the development of deepImageJ, ZeroCostDL4Mic, DeepBacs and the BioImage Model Zoo. She also collaborates in the Cell Tracking Challenge and she’s a trainer in NEUBIAS training school for BioImage Analysts, EMBO practical courses on image processing, EMBL-EBI courses for Microscopy Data Analysis, Neurophotonics Summer School at CERVO institute & Universidad Laval, and the DL@MBL. Find out more about her career on her website and Twitter account.

In AI4Life, Estibaliz works on the connection between the resources that build models (ZeroCostDL4Mic) and consume them (deepImageJ), and the BioImage Model Zoo.

Estibaliz Gomez de Mariscal
Fiona Inglis

Fiona is currently a Research Software Engineer developing QuPath, a software for viewing, processing and quantifying microscopic images with a specific focus on large whole-slide images. She was first exposed to the imaging world while working as a slide-scanning imaging technician for the University of Edinburgh, after her first BSc in infectious diseases. 2 years on, she switched her career path to web development as she wanted to pursue programming full-time after enjoying scripting imageJ macros for researchers. Fiona completed another BSc alongside working, this time in Software Development, and then she found out about the opportunity to be part of Pete Bankhead’s growing QuPath team. This role has allowed her to combine her interests and has introduced her to a fantastic community, working together to put cutting-edge AI tools into researchers’ hands.

This was my first hackathon and therefore I planned to absorb as much knowledge as possible from those around me. Being at an in-person event after working remotely for so long was very refreshing and hugely beneficial to knowledge sharing and discussions. I spent the time understanding QuPaths current integration of deep learning, exploring the tools developed by others at the event and ways to increase the compatibility of these tools with each other.

Fiona Inglis

Lucia is a biomedical and computer science engineer, working on AI4Life with Dr Arrate Muñoz Barrutia. She did an MSc in Information Engineering for Health in order to use her skills to make deep learning accessible and easy to use in the Life Sciences field. She is now involved in the development of new tools and resources for biomedical image analysis and the improvement of some currently existing like DeepimageJ.

In the past years, she has been involved in projects related to neurodegeneration and rare blood diseases, trying to understand these conditions and find new ways to diagnose them. She is committed to inspiring new generations to pursue STEM careers and making science easy to understand for people not in the field. For that matter she has been part of some initiatives like #JuntosXElCancer, creating didactical biomedical engineering content related to cancer research; and she has also been part of CEEIBIS, the national committee for biomedical and health engineering, organizing talks and events for students that want to pursue a career in this field. Know more about Lucia on her website.

During these days, I have been Improving deepImageJ plugin, to make it easier to use and creating new ImageJ plugins for image processing, using both classical and deep learning tools.
Lucia Moya-Sans
Lucia Moya-Sans
Beatriz Serrano-Solano

Beatriz Serrano-Solano is a software engineer with a PhD in Computational Biology from the University of Málaga (Spain). After successfully defending her thesis, she embarked on a journey to Germany where she continued her academic pursuits as a postdoctoral researcher at EMBL Heidelberg. There, she participated in scientific projects for the European project EOSCpilot and later EOSC-Life. Later, and for a bit more than two years, she served as the community manager for the European Galaxy project, showcasing her expertise in project management and community building. Today, she holds the position of Scientific Project Manager at Euro-BioImaging, where she is involved in the European project AI4Life.

In AI4Life, Beatriz leads the work package for Communication, Outreach and Training, being also heavily involved in the organisation of the Open Calls and Challenges that will take place during the 3 years of the project.

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event report

Outcomes of the AI4Life & BioImage Archive FAIR AI Workshop

AI4Life & BIOIMAGE ARCHIVE FAIR AI WORKSHOP

Online, 24-25 January 2023

 

AI4Life & BioImage Archive FAIR AI Workshop

by Matthew Hartley and Teresa Zulueta-Coarasa

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) are transforming the way we analyse biological images, benefitting particularly the processing of large and heterogenous image datasets. The development of these AI models relies on high-quality annotated images, which will determine the model’s performance, robustness, and scalability. Therefore, providing open access to useful, annotated datasets adhering to the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability), is essential for the development, reproducibility, and reuse of AI models. However, sharing biological image AI datasets is challenging due to the lack of standards for representing annotation data widely adopted across the community.

The BioImage Archive (BIA), EMBL-EBI’s data resource for open life sciences image data, provides general purpose deposition services for any imaging dataset accompanying a publication, as well as reference image data. As part of the AI4Life project, we want to improve the BIA’s support for image annotations as part of AI-ready datasets and to develop annotation standards for the community. 

To this end, we held a virtual workshop on the 24 and 25 of January with 46 community experts from various backgrounds, including data generators, annotators, curators, AI researchers and software developers. The participants discussed four main topics:

  • What are the important types of annotation to record, and what extra information/metadata should accompany them?
  • What are the useful ways (formats, metadata) to share and present annotation data?
  • How should we support/allow/encourage sharing and archival of annotations?
  • What are our community recommendations to accelerate AI methods development through sharing AI image annotations, what are the missing pieces?

Each topic was first discussed in breakout rooms and afterwards each group presented their conclusions to the rest of the participants. This approach resulted in lively and insightful discussions and a series of recommendations.

The immediate output from the workshop will be a white paper, co-authored by the workshop participants, summarising community recommendations. Furthermore, The BIA team is now working on transforming the workshop outcomes into metadata standards for AI datasets, and into software and tools to facilitate the deposition and sharing of AI images and annotations.

Beyond these outputs, we expect that the workshop recommendations will help annotation generators and consumers work together more effectively, facilitating the construction of benchmark collections of datasets to test model generalisation and reuse. Thank you to all the participants for their valuable contributions!

AcknowledgementS
Categories
event report

BioHackathon Europe 2022

Biohackathon europe 2022

Paris, 7-11 November 2022

by Beatriz Serrano-Solano

AI4Life was present this year at the BioHackathon Europe 2022, which took place in November at Campus Des Berges de Seine, near Paris. Since 2018, ELIXIR Europe has been organising the BioHackathon to bring together both ELIXIR and non-ELIXIR members to work on projects aligned with the ELIXIR Platforms, Communities or Focus Groups.

The participation of AI4Life was focused on two projects:
– Project 9: Disseminating FAIR Machine Learning Models via BioModels
– Project 17: Metadata schemas supporting Linked Open Science (with a focus on reproducibility)

Through the interaction with these two projects, we explored the collaboration of the BioImage Model Zoo with databases like BioModels, by discussing the minimum metadata that would allow the interoperability between such resources. We also engaged with more initiatives like Bioschemas, the DOME recommendations, the EDAM ontology and the ELIXIR Machine Learning Focus Group.

We will be happy to continue these interactions, and we look forward to our future collaboration and participation in similar events.

AcknowledgementS
Categories
past events

Workshop: Towards FAIR AI image data

Workshop: Towards FAIR AI image data

Date

Venue

Description

24-25 January, 2023

Online

The BioImage Archive (BIA), EMBL-EBI’s data resource for open life sciences image data, provides general-purpose deposition services for any imaging dataset accompanying a publication, as well as reference image data. The BIA currently supports basic deposition of image annotations together with corresponding images. As part of the recently awarded Horizon Europe project, AI4LIFE, we would like to improve the BioImage Archive’s support for image annotations as part of AI-ready datasets.
In particular, we wish to make deposited annotations as widely usable as possible, adhering to the FAIR principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability. This is particularly challenging for image annotations, since there are few standards for representing annotation data that are widely adopted across the community.
Towards this end, we will hold a workshop involving participants from the bioimaging AI community, including data generators, annotators, AI researchers and software/tool developers.

Categories
event report

AI4Life First Hackathon

FIRST AI4LIFE HACKATHON

Heidelberg, 27-28 October 2022

by Beatriz Serrano-Solano

During the kick-off meeting in October 2022, the AI4Life project partners discussed and identified various topics that the team will be tackling over the next 3 years. Following up on the meeting outcomes, a two-day hackathon was organized to start working on those specific topics and challenges that came out of the discussion. Throughout the two-day event, participants were able to make significant progress, and soon after the beginning of the event, the first success stories started to arise. More of these events will follow during the 3 years of the project to keep the momentum and the collaboration going. Thank you to all the participants!

AcknowledgementS
Categories
event report

Kick-off meeting in Heidelberg

Kick-off meeting

Heidelberg, 25-26 October 2022

by Beatriz Serrano-Solano

AI4Life European project is a collaborative effort that brings together 10 partners from 8 different European countries. Those partners include 4 European Research Infrastructures, covering a broad scope of scientific use cases: marine biology (EMBRC), plant phenotyping (EMPHASIS), compound screening (EU-OPENSCREEN) and structural biology (Instruct). The project is funded with a budget of 4 million euros, which will be used to bridge the gap between the computational and life science communities. AI4Life will last for 3 years, during which time the team will work together to achieve the project’s objectives:
  1. Democratized availability of AI-based image analysis methods.
  2. Establish standards for the submission, storage and FAIR access.
  3. Simple model deployment, sharing, and dissemination through a new developer-facing service.
  4. Organize Open Calls and Challenges for image analysis problems.
  5. Empower common image analysis platforms with AI integration.
  6. Organizing outreach and training events i.e. image analysis courses/workshops and participation in international conferences.

AI4Life officially started in September and kicked off at the end of October 2022. During the kick-off meeting, experts from across Europe gathered in Heidelberg for two days, during which the participants actively engaged in discussions about the timeline, milestones, deliverables and work distribution among the partners, and agreed on a plan for the next few months. The team members are also committed to maintaining an open line of communication with the audience and keeping them informed of the project’s progress throughout the duration of the project. 

Overall, the team had a productive meeting, and we are excited to begin working together.  Thank you to all the organizers, speakers, and participants!

Program
Time Topic Speaker/s
09:00 – 09:10 Welcome Rachel Robinson-Lehtinen
09:10 – 09:40 Introduction to AI4Life & Euro-BioImaging ERIC John Eriksson
09:40 – 09:50 Interactions with other Horizon Europe funded projects Antje Keppler
09:50 – 10:55 Interactions with partner RIs Aastha Mathur, Davide de Cioccio, Roland Pieruschka,
Katja Herzog, Silke Schumacher
10:55 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 11:30 Message from the European Commission Project Adviser Antonio Ventura
European Research Executive Agency
11:30 – 12:00 EOSC and costing for cloud resources Peter Maccallum
CTO ELIXIR
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch & Group Photo
13:00 – 13:25 Project administration, timelines & reporting (WP1: Project Management) Rachel Robinson-Lehtinen
Appointment of the Executive Board
Appointment of the Open Calls Selection Committee
13:25 – 15:30 Introduction of Scientific Topics Anna Kreshuk & Florian Jug
WP2: User services & computing infrastructures Wei Ouyang
WP3: Direct support Arrate Muñoz
Discussion Anna Kreshuk & Florian Jug
15:30 – 15:40 Coffee Break
15:40 – 17:45 WP4: Contributing services Ricardo Henriques
WP5: Data, model & computing standards Matthew Hartley
WP6: Support for open calls, challenges & new services Florian Jug
WP7: Communication, outreach & training Aastha Mathur, Marianna Childress-Poli
Discussion Anna Kreshuk & Florian Jug
19:15 Dinner
Time Topic
09:00 – 12:30 Workshop on technical discussions / Pressing issues raised in Day 1
AcknowledgementS
Categories
News

Press Release

Press release

25.10.2022

Bridging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with Bioimage Analysis

The AI4Life project launched today, marks an exciting chapter in the computational and life science research communities. The €4 million Horizon Europe funded project aims to create accessible, harmonized, and interoperable AI tools and methods for solving today’s microscopy image analysis problems.

THE GAP

Machine learning (ML) has accelerated frontier research in the life sciences, but democratized access to such methods is not a given. Limited access to necessary hardware/software and expertise combined with insufficiently documented methods hinder life science researchers from harnessing the power of such tools. Furthermore, while modern Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based methods typically generalize well to unseen data, no standard exists for sharing and fine-tuning pretrained models between different analysis tools. Compounding the issue, existing user-facing platforms operate entirely independently, often failing to comply with FAIR data and Open Science standards. Furthermore, the staggering pace of AI and ML development make it impossible for the non-specialist to stay up to date. Hence, urgent services and infrastructures to solve such problems are required to expand cutting edge life science research.

THE BRIDGE

The 10-partner consortium will build an open, accessible, community-driven repository of FAIR pre-trained AI models and develop services to deliver these models to life scientists, including those without substantial computational expertise. AI4Life will provide direct support and ample training activities to prepare life scientists for responsible use of AI methods. Additionally, AI4Life will drive community contributions of new models and interoperability between analysis tools. AI4Life will also facilitate Open calls and public Challenges aimed at providing state-of-the-art solutions to unsolved image analysis problems in life science research. 

AI4Life brings together AI/ML researchers, developers of open-source image analysis tools, providers of European-scale storage and compute services, and European life science Research Infrastructures – all united behind the common goal to enable life scientists to benefit from the untapped, tremendous power of AI-based analysis methods.

THE CORE OBJECTIVES

  • Democratize availability of AI-based image analysis methods
  • Establish standards for the submission, storage, and FAIR access of reference data, reference annotations (ground-truth), trained AI models, and trainable AI methods
  • Simple model deployment, sharing and dissemination through a new developer-facing service
  • Organize Open calls and Challenges for image analysis problems
  • Empower common image analysis platforms with AI integration
  • Organizing outreach and training events

THE TEAM

Our multidisciplinary team of experts in computational and life sciences as well as 4 European Research Infrastructures.

10

PARTNERS

3

YEARS

8

COUNTRIES

4M

EUROS