Open Source Bioinformatics for Data Scientists

Last night was the ODSC Launch Meetup covering Open-Source Bioinformatics for Data Scientists with Amanda Schierz.

Amanda Schierz is a widely recognised data scientist and currently the #1 Kaggler in the United Kingdom. The Meetup was really informative and engaging and also a great community of people were involved. It was such a change to the standard Meetups I usually attend.

The reason that this was so different from any other Data Science Meetup I have been to, was it was heavily focused on the medical and health fields. The focus of this talk was on Early-stage Drug Discovery, an ideal area where predictive analytics can have a profound impact. She presented multiple use cases such as druggability predictions, network analysis to explain drug resistance, and the prediction of candidate chemical compounds.

Amanda talked a lot about Cancer research and the battle that data scientists and researches have to communicate the information. It's often that case that people in medical fields don't trust the data as they are used to doing tests on animals or live subjects to get results.

What Amanda was pushing was that we can now use technology to our advantage to no longer have to test on animals or humans. We can now predict things in any direction with multiple outcomes simply by understanding the data created which was fascinating.

About the event itself, ran a great event in a very cool startup hub located in East London called the Rise. The venue is almost secret unless you know about it hidden behind a hipster eatery and up a set of stairs. Once in the space it's massive and has a great vibe full of startup teams and entrepreneurs.

The data science networking was great as it was the launch of ODSC so brand new faces and businesses. As it was a health related talk lots of medical companies and research groups were there as well which was a change from the usual Data Science crowd. All in all a really great night and the potential to Meetup outside with some like minded individuals i may want to partner with on projects.