Visit to Instituto Federal Goiano and Other Events in Brazil

Visit to Instituto Federal Goiano

On 27 and 28 November 2024, our postdoc researcher, Maria Beatriz Walter Costa, attended the “International Conference on Biotechnology and Machine Learning Applied to Agriculture”. The conference was held at Instituto Federal Goiano (IF GoianoExternal link) in the city of Rio Verde, Brazil, and organized by Prof. Heyde França, who visited the VEO Group during the first semester of 2024. Maria Beatriz’s visit to the IF Goiano was supported by a collaboration grant from FAPEGExternal link, Brazil which also enabled Prof. França to stay with us in Jena, where she worked on our joint project. The event brought together students and researchers from various fields, including Agronomy, Biology, and Computer Science. 

Prof França gave a talk on the application of artificial intelligence in agriculture, and Maria Beatriz presented our joint project on associating genomic features of prokaryotes with abiotic environmental factors using machine learning. She also visited different research centers and laboratories, gaining insights into their areas of interest, which are applied to specific agricultural and societal needs in the Brazilian region. This was an excellent opportunity for networking and sharing knowledge!

Brazilian Symposium on Bioinformatics

From 2 to 4 December 2024, Bia attended the “Brazilian Symposium on Bioinformatics 2024” (BSB 2024External link). The conference was held at the Cidade da Inovação in the city of Vitória, Brazil. The symposium featured four keynote talks, including one by Prof. Maria Emília Walter, who spoke about the role of women in science and research administration in Brazil, and another by Prof. Peter Stadler, who presented his theoretical work on chemical reaction networks. The event offered numerous networking opportunities, where Bia reconnected with old colleagues and made new contacts, while discussing the latest developments in machine learning and Bioinformatics.

The event offered numerous networking opportunities, where Bia reconnected with old colleagues and made new contacts, while discussing the latest developments in machine learning and Bioinformatics.

Symposium of Molecular Biology at the University of Brasília

On 6 December 2024, Bia was invited to give a talk at the Symposium of the Molecular Biology Graduate Program at the University of Brasília.

Her presentation, “Association Between Prokaryotic Genomes and Environmental Abiotic Factors Using Machine Learning,” was similar to the one she gave in Rio Verde. The audience, which included Master's and PhD students and professors from the Molecular Biology Department, provided valuable input and feedback on the project.

Statistics Workshop: fundamentals

On 12 December 2024, Bia taught a 2.5-hour introductory workshop on statistics, organized by Prof. Heyde França (IF Goiano).

This initiative was a collaboration between the Viral Ecology and Omics Group and the Instituto Federal Goiano (IF Goiano), Rio Verde Campus. The workshop was designed for graduate students in Biology and related fields in Brazil, and consisted of a 1-hour lecture followed by a 1.5-hour practical session. The recording of the workshop (in Portuguese) is available hereExternal link. The materials are available on thisExternal link GitHub page.

The lecture covered topics such as variable types, distributions, and statistical methods, including the parametric and non-parametric tests and linear regression. In the practical session, students worked through exercises to manually perform a t-test, with the goal of determining whether two bacterial groups had the same cultivation temperatures. The feedback from the students was very positive, and we successfully achieved the goal of teaching fundamental statistical concepts to students in biological fields.