#NGSchool2020: Statistical Learning in Genomics

In recent years genomics has been moving forward at an incredibly fast pace. The Human Genome Project that resulted in sequencing the first human genome cost about $2.7 billion and took 13 years to complete (1990-2003). In stark contrast, today your genome can be sequenced for about $1,000 in just a few days. The biggest genomic projects aim at sequencing hardly believable numbers of 100,000 (100,000 Genomes Project, finished in 2018) or 500,000 (ongoing project of Sanger Institute, samples from UK biobank) genomes. Moreover, thousands of other organisms are sequenced around the world with the NCBI Genome database containing complete sequences of almost 20,000 organisms. Such an unimaginable amount of data can be analysed only with the use of advanced statistical and machine learning methods.

Taking this rapid development into account, #NGSchool2020 will be an intensive course on modern statistical learning methods used in genomics. The program will cover a range of topics, from fundamental to state of the art methods, including probability, inference, unsupervised learning, model selection and deep learning.

Important dates

Registration

Registration will be open from March 16, 12 PM CET to April 17, 23:59 CET. You can find more information about the selection procedure here.

Register

Speakers

Aakrosh Ratan, University of Virginia, USA
and more coming soon!

Venue & social activities

#NGSchool2020 will be held on 22 - 31 of July 2020 in Promenada, Białobrzegi near Warsaw, Poland.

Similarly to previous years, we'll make sure there is plenty of fun beside hard work during workshops :) Those include yachting, BBQ nights and adventure field games.
You can check photos from previous editions for a sample of that.

Organisers & partners

• Katarzyna Kędzierska, WCHG, OX, Oxford, GB
  
• Lidia Lipińska, University of Warsaw, Poland
  
• Natalia Pstrąg, UAM, Poznań, Poland
  
• Anamaria Elek, CRG, Barcelona, Spain
  
• Karolina Sienkiewicz, CPHG, University of Virginia, USA
  
• German Demidov, IMGAG, University of Tübingen, Germany
  
• Eugeniusz Tralle, IIMCB, Warsaw, Poland
  
• Samantha Filipów, CECAD, University of Cologne, Germany
  
• Urszula Smyczyńska, Medical University of Lodz, Poland
  
• Szymon Grabia, Medical University of Lodz, Poland
  
• Gladys Langi, Medical University of Bialystok, Poland
  

Cost

We do our best to acquire the funding for NGSchool so that the registration fee is low enough to make NGSchool available to every willing student or early stage researcher. In recent years, thanks to generous support from the International Visegrad Fund and other sponsors we are able to set the registration fee at €100. Otherwise, the real cost equals $800 - $1000 per participant. We’ll put information on the website and our social channels as soon as we have any news (hopefully good one) on funding.

Program

We’ll invite speakers who will host lectures, workshops and hackathons.

At the beginning of the school we’ll organize an introductory session covering basics of programming and statistics, together with necessary software configuration. Next 4 days will be filled with lectures and workshops in fundamental, and gradually, more advanced data analysis methods in genomics. Finally, the participants will take part in hackathons, during which they will develop projects on currently relevant genomic topics. They will be guided by hackathon mentors.