Announcing the first RSG Belgium Hackathon

RSG Belgium is excited to announce the first RSG Belgium Hackathon, which will take place in Brussels on the 16th of November 2018.

This event represents a good opportunity for MSc/PhD students from all scientific backgrounds to improve their problem solving, teamwork and coding skills by working together as a multidisciplinary team.

The RSG Belgium team has chosen four different projects to chose from, which are described below. We ask you to already indicate your preference during registration. This is not binding, but it gives us a way to gauge interest.

Do not hesitate, register now!

Where and when?

• Registration deadline: 27 October 2018
• Date and time: 16/11/2018, 09:00 until 18:00
• Place: Université Libre de Bruxelles, La Plaine Campus, Building NO, 9th floor, room: 2NO906 (“Salle des professeurs”), Brussels, Belgium

More information on how to get there is provided below.

Projects

Mining Citation Networks

Scientific literature keeps growing at an alarming rate and it quickly becomes almost impossible to find relevant information for your research field. Especially given the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of research, it is crucial that relevant scientific results can be quickly and easily accessed. Therefore, the goal of this project is to facilitate this process by mining scientific literature citation networks and highlighting the underlying patterns. Additionally, emergent information could by gained by text mining these papers’ abstracts and integrating them into the network.

What is the Kardashian Index (K-Index) of your bioinformatics research?

We have all experienced this, the lousy work of your competitor is all over social media, while your recent brilliant paper was barely noticed. But does this actually mean anything … academically speaking? By collecting various social media parameters, e.g. altmetric, retweets, reads, news coverage, etc., and comparing this to the academic side of things, e.g. the impact factor of papers, their citations and their “robustness” in research, we can find patterns or correlations between the academic impact and the broader circulation of the research.

Twitterbot

Keeping track of the research or available datasets in your field is always a challenge. What if you had your personal Twitter bot to take care of this for you? In this project we will code a bot covering your topic of interest, in the LactoBot style (https://twitter.com/Lactobot).

Generating an AI-written bioinformatics paper

There have been many examples of AI-generated papers, mostly in the domain of computer science. In this project we will generate such an AI-written bioinformatics paper using for example Markov chains or recurrent neural networks. Tasks involve the generation of text and graphics, the collection of relevant examples, etc.

How to get there?

In general, the university is accessible by metro, bus and train. Specific signs for the hackathon will be available at the main bus and metro stops outside the university to guide you.

Please also consult the following map of the ULB Campus de la plaine to guide you to the NO Building.

Access from the Bruxelles-Central train station

From the Brussels Central station the university is accessible either by metro or bus.

• Metro: You follow the metro signs inside the station. You take the metro line 5 towards “Herrmann-Debroux” and you take off at the station “Delta”. There, you follow the exit with the “ULB” sign. The building NO is within 4 minutes walking distance. Estimated total time: 20 minutes.
• Bus: You take the line 71, whose stop is just next to the main entrance of the train station, towards “Delta”. You take off at the stop “Fraiteur” and you pass at the other side of the road, towards the university Entrance 2. The building NO is within 2 minutes walking distance. Estimated total time: 30 minutes.

Access from the Bruxelles-Midi (Brussel-Zuid) train station

You can follow the metro signs inside the Bruxelles-Midi station. You can take either the metro line 2 or line 6 towards “Elisabeth” and you stop at the metro station “Art-Loi (Kunst-Wet)”. There, you change for the metro line 5 towards “Herrmann-Debroux” and you take off at the station “Delta”. At the station you follow the exit with the “ULB” sign. The building NO is within 4 minutes walking distance.

Estimated total time: 25 minutes.

Access from the train station Etterbeek (Etterbeek Gare)

From the train station Etterbeek the university is reachable within walking distance. Walking out of the station you follow the Boulevard Général Jacques on the right and then you turn right at the Boulevard de la Plaine. After walking around 600 m, you can find the Access 2 of ULB on your left.

Estimated total time: 13 minutes.

Access from the train station Delta

At the station, you follow the exit with the “ULB” sign. The building NO is within 4 minutes walking distance.

General access with bus or tram

In general, the university is reachable with the bus line 71 (direction “Delta”, stop at “Fraiteur”), bus line 72 (direction “ULB”, stop at “Fraiteur”).

The closest tram stop is for the tram line 95 (direction “Wiener”, stop at “Thys”).

General access with metro

ULB is reachable with the metro line 5 (direction “Herrmann-Debroux”, metro station “Delta”). There, you follow the exit with the “ULB” sign. The building NO is within 4 minutes walking distance.