The weekend event united more than 40 engineers, researchers and students, all specialists in and impassioned by the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence. The three winning projects mine biological, clinical or genomics data to conserve species, enable diagnoses, or increase knowledge on life processes.
The objectives of the Digital4genomics (D4Gen) Hackathon, with the teams who propose specific subjects, are to surmount technological obstacles and inspire the participating students to put their initial training into practice and expand their competencies. This second D4Gen edition focused on deploying artificial intelligence as a tool to understand how complex ecosystems work, study biological diversity, and model life processes or novel bioprocesses.
The event united project holders from the Genopole ecosystem, Genoscope/CEA-Jacob, the South Île-de-France Medical Center (CHSF) and SAMOVAR-Télécom SudParis, and theInstitut Pasteur and theInstitut CURIE, and participants from the territory’s higher education centers, such as the University of Evry (UE-PS), University of Paris-Saclay, Télécom SudParis (TSP) and ENSIIE (French Grande École for informatics in industry and business).
The constituted teams also counted members from Ecole 42, ESGI (Grande École for computer engineering), ESSEC Business School and even MIT in Boston (USA).
Blaise HANCZAR (IBISC) and Patrick HORAIN (TSP) acted as mentors, providing the teams with support and expertise to help them rise to the challenge.
Three laureate teams
🏆 The first prize went to Team PreExtinction , headed by Nicolas Godron, Master 2 student in pharmacy and GENIOMHE (genomics informatics and mathematics for health and environment.
The team focused on modeling the state of species conservation laid out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (UICN) to guide biodiversity policies and resource allocations. Historic data from the UICN Red List of Threatened Species served as the main input data for the PreExtinction model.
Headed by Dr MAHFOUD (CHSF), the AIAF-Stroke team took home the second prize. They developed an AI model that uses biological and clinical data to predict the risk of arrhythmia early in stroke to personalize treatment and optimize the prognosis.
Finally, the third prize was awarded to the Naspode project forwarded by Marco Antonio Mendoza, who leads the SysFate research team he created thanks to a Genopole Atige grant and support from the University of Évry and Télécom SudParis. The Naspode project seeks to build upon nanopore sequencing technology to develop a tool to demultiplex DNA reads in pooled samples with the ultimate objective of mapping tissue complexity at the molecular level.
Congratulations to these winning teams and all of the participants for their accomplishments and the synergies created between the groups during these 48 hours of non-stop effort.
We look forward to seeing the teams next year for the third edition of the Digital4genomics Hackathon!
