2017 miRcore’s GIDAS Biotechnology Summer Camp participants
Community Outreach
MICDE remains committed to advancing the understanding of science in general, and computational science in particular, in the community. To this end we have continued our support of internal and external organizations. Externally, our ongoing support of the non profit science outreach group, miRcore, included running MICDE sponsored compute cycles on Flux for high school students participating in miRcore’s computational biology summer camps through their student network called GIDAS. We also continued to support the undergraduate Biosoftware Team that has competed in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) year competition for the past five years. The team participates in the software track aimed for computer scientists and developers to nurture their knowledge of biology, and for computational biologists, bioinformaticians and biologists to enhance their aptitude for building software. Over the past couple of years, the team has been developing ProtoCat, a software developed to address the issue of reproducibility in synthetic biology. It is a collaborative platform on which researchers share their experiment protocols and users can customize them to meet their own needs. For the third year in a row, the team returned with a gold medal.
2017 BioSoftware Team
Internally, less than two years since its inception, the Scientific Computing Student Club (SC2) has established several activities that complement the formal training in computational science available at U-M, including through MICDE’s PhD in Scientific Computing, and Graduate Certificate in Computational Discovery and Engineering. Over the past year, the SC2 had his own invited speakers, organized tours to the Flux facility and the U-M 3D Lab, organized the first Visualization Challenge, co-sponsored by NVIDIA, and just recently added a section on its web page for academic and non-academic job opportunities. During the 2017 Fall Term, SC2 students ran a weekly Machine Learning Collaborative Workshop, and the group is planning a hands-on series on code parallelization.
Industrial Engagement
We continue working towards increasing our engagement with industry. Over the last two years, in addition to NVIDIA, MICDE has established partnerships with IBM, through the joint design and development of our computer cluster, ConFlux, and with Toyota Research Institute, through a funded project on scientific software for materials research. We are now working in partnership with the U-M Business Engagement Center to create an MICDE industrial affiliates program, which will provide many additional avenues for interaction between our students or faculty and industry.