by Admin | Feb 26, 2025 | Events
The HEREDITARY consortium will take part in the upcoming JARDIN Hackathon on Health Data Federated Querying, an event organized by the European Commission. The Hackathon aims to tackle key challenges in integrating sensitive health data across multiple institutions while exploring innovative solutions. Its objectives align closely with our project’s goals, particularly in the fields of federated analytics and learning. A key focus will be enabling federated queries, allowing researchers to extract valuable insights without compromising patient privacy or data security.
This initiative brings together experts from diverse fields, fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange to address these complex issues effectively.
Key topics to be explored during the hackathon include:
- Harmonizing data exports from healthcare provider systems.
- Developing tools and methods for federated data querying.
- Enhancing semantic representation and ensuring compliance with FAIR data principles.
The event is open to professionals from various disciplines, including clinicians, data stewards, analysts, developers, and semantic web specialists, all of whom play a crucial role in advancing data harmonization and secure querying practices.
Although an official event date has not yet been set, the registration deadline for the hackathon is March 5, 2025. We invite all interested participants to seize this opportunity to contribute to the future of digital healthcare while gaining valuable insights. Check here the preliminary agenda!
by Admin | Feb 21, 2025 | Events
On February 20, 2025, in Udine, Italy, the HEREDITARY project participated in the Conference on Information and Research science Connecting to Digital and Library science (IRCDL) 2025, presenting the paper titled “Extending Nanopublications with Knowledge Provenance for Multi-Source Scientific Assertions”. A fantastic work submitted by Fabio Giachelle, Stefano Marchesin, Laura Menotti, and Gianmaria Silvello from the University of Padua, that was honored with the Best Paper Award, standing out at this prestigious conference.
This builds on the success of HEREDITARY at IRCDL for the second consecutive year. In 2024, the team introduced “Publishing CoreKB Facts as Nanopublications”, a study on extracting gene expression-cancer associations from scientific literature and storing them in the CoreKB platform for machine-readable and shareable insights.
This year’s award-winning paper extends the nanopublication model by incorporating knowledge provenance. Unlike traditional models that track assertions from single sources, this approach enables multi-source scientific assertions. Applied to data from the CORE system, this method generated 197.511 extended nanopublications, improving the identification, representation, and citation of gene expression-cancer associations.
About IRCDL
The Conference on Information and Research science Connecting to Digital and Library science (IRCDL) is a key annual event for researchers working in digital libraries and related fields. It covers a wide range of topics, from digital content management to theoretical information models. The conference brings together experts from academia, government, industry, and other sectors, drawing on disciplines such as computer science, digital humanities, information science, archival studies, and cultural heritage. The 2025 edition (the 21st of the Conference) featured two tracks: one on Computer Science Foundations for Digital Libraries and another on Digital Humanities.
The recognition of the HEREDITARY research at IRCDL 2025 highlights our significant contributions to scientific knowledge and health data, driving forward the frontiers of personalized health solutions.
by Admin | Feb 11, 2025 | Events, Hereditary
The HEREDITARY project consortium has carried out its third Plenary Meeting, the first in-person in 2025, which took place on the 5th and 6th of February in Barcelona (Spain). Representatives of partner institutions met there for two productive days of updating, planning, learning, and reviewing the next stages for the Project’s second year.
Day 1 of the meeting included an overview of the project state, the introduction of progress updates on each work package, along with internal workshops or activities to enhance the participants’ capacities. Each WP lead partner delivered a presentation to allow the consortium members to learn first-hand about the advancements made to date and future steps.
On Day 2, WPs’ presentations were completed early in the morning and, then, participants focused on data discussions on genomics, gut-brain interplay, parkinson’s disease in the eye and evidence-based knowledge base construction. They proceeded with the presentation of the Information Extraction CLEF 2025 challenge and closed the day with a short summing-up session.
Decoding 2024
The first year of work has laid the foundations on which the project will be built. One of our most noticiable achievement this year has been the delivery of 16 high-quality deliverables, all on time, demonstrating our efficiency and dedication to project development. These deliverables are available on our website, and we encourage anyone interested to consult those that are publicly accessible, on our zenodo profile.
Throughout 2024, several significant technical advancements have been made, including:
- The Review and Verification of Use-Cases (UNITO – D2.16 and D2.19), which include the decision on the proprietary and public data formats, structures, and sharing methods.
- A Computing Infrastructure Setup (SURF – D2.14) at medical centers and the test of a communication protocol.
- Ontology Development for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) (UNIPD – D3.1), including the design of federated execution methods, as part of the Federated Learning Working Group.
- Medical Terminology Creation (UNL – D3.4), encompassing corpus construction, terminology extraction, and conceptual/lexical relations.
- The development of initial visualization components (TUGRAZ – D5.1 and D5.3) for sequences, networks, text, high-dimensional, spatial, image, and simulation data. Focusing on brain, gut microbiota, gut-brain, ALS, clustering and Droplets.
- The definition of Health Social Labs (OBSERVA – D6.1) and the implementation of the first ones.
- A preliminary overview of the legal and ethical requirements (KU LEUVEN – D7.1) for the HEREDITARY project.
- The launch of various communication channels (FEUGA – D8.1), aligned with the project’s communication strategy.
New year, new goals
This meeting serves as a launching pad for all that is yet to come during this exciting 2025. Some of them are:
- In 2025, we will have 25 new deliverables, the project maximum number of deliverables in one year.
- Several tasks will start during this year.
- Set up the federated learning and analytics infrastructure. Which must work in in testing environment, for which use cases 1 and 2 will be used. HEREDITARY must deliver concrete applications of federated infrastructure design.
- Develop the federated workflow execution engine on top of the federated data management infrastructure.
- The improvement in FAIRness, focusing on discoverability, for the participating data sources in HEREDITARY.
- We will also hold our first reporting to the European Commission in June 2025!
All this being said, 2025 is set to be a promising year in which together we will continue to make strides towards our goal to improve the way we approach healthcare.
Stay tuned for the latest news and updates!
by Admin | Jan 22, 2025 | Events
The HEREDITARY project is taking part in the GutBrainIE CLEF 2025 challenge, as part of the BioASQ Workshop (Task #6) that will be held as a Lab in CLEF 2025, on September 9-12, 2025, in Madrid, Spain. This initiative offers a unique opportunity for researchers and developers to contribute to the advancing field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and biomedical research.
This year’s challenge focuses on extracting structured information (concepts, relationships, and term variants) from biomedical texts related to the gut microbiota, and its critical connections with Parkinson’s disease and mental health. As new insights into the gut-brain axis continue to emerge, this challenge is a vital initiative for the scientific community to explore further the complex interplay between gut health and neurological disorders.
The GutBrainIE task is divided into two main subtasks. In the first one, participants are asked to identify and classify specific text spans into predefined categories. In contrast, in the second one, they must determine if a particular relationship defined between two categories holds or not. The submitted runs are evaluated based on Precision, Recall, and F1 measures for each subtask using gold annotations created by domain experts.
Important Dates
- Registration Deadline: April 25, 2025
- Test Data Release: April 28, 2025
- Runs Submission Deadline: May 10, 2025
- Evaluation Results: May 19, 2025
- Workshop Dates: September 9-12, 2025, in Madrid, Spain
Don’t miss out on the chance to be part of this groundbreaking event! Register before April 25, 2025, and make your mark on the future of biomedical research.
by Admin | Nov 18, 2024 | Events, Hereditary
In the framework of Work Package 5: Visual Analytics and Interaction, Graz University of Technology (WP5 leader) presented the poster DROPLETS: A Marker Design for visually enhancing Local Cluster Associations on Sunday 13 October as part of a submission to the Bio+MedVis Challenge at IEEE VIS 2024.
The research of TU Graz, focused on the visualisation of high dimensional data, received an award for the novelty and innovative Visualization technique design. It was presented by Stefan Lengauer in a virtual format, who is one of the authors along with Peter Waldert and Tobias Schreck. The summary poster, the full publication, the video presentation and the source code for generating the Droplets layout are available and can be consulted.
This year’s objective of the Bio+MedVis Challenge was to redesign an existing visualization of multi-cell gene expressions of tissue samples. In this, multiple cells are accumulated into pixels. For each pixel, the visualization should convey the prevalence and extent of cell types it is composed of in a proportional relation. The provided baseline technique of superimposed Pie charts limits the perception of regions with coherent cell-type compositions, which constitutes one of the essential visual analytics tasks.
As a response, TU Graz proposed a novel marker design: DROPLETS, a space-saving design for visually enhancing the presence of clusters and regional borders. This concept was evaluated for the given tissue sample and compared with the given baseline and other alternatives.
About the IEEE VIS 2024
IEEE VIS 2024 was the year’s premier forum for advances in theory, methods, and applications of visualization and visual analytics. The conference convened an international community of researchers and practitioners from universities, government, and industry to exchange recent findings on the design and use of visualization tools.
Join us and TU Graz to learn more about Hereditary Project and how visualization techniques help to face the critical challenge of leveraging multimodal health data.
by Admin | Nov 7, 2024 | Events
The 4th edition of the Brain Innovation Days, organised by the European Brain Council, one of the partners involved in the HEREDITARY project, will take place on 13-14 November 2024 in Brussels, Belgium. The aim of the event is to bring the wider brain ecosystem together to foster dialogue, exchange knowledge, accelerate investment in research & innovation and facilitate business development.
Key players and experts in the brain space across Europe and beyond will be able to connect through a networking-friendly programme and innovation showcasing. You can look forward to inspiring keynotes, panel discussions, the Brain Innovation Days Pitch Competition, an Innovation Hall, and much more.
This year’s Brain Innovation Days will take place under the overarching theme “Navigating the Brain Across a Lifetime“! The main theme will revolve around 5 subthemes:
🧠 Blossoming Brains: Early Brain Development
🏫 Building Brains: Schools and Workplaces
🏥 Timeless Brains: Nurturing Resilience, Embracing Change
⚙️ Holistic Brains: Strategies for Brain Health in a Dynamic Society
🚀 Advancements in Neurotechnology: Pioneering Innovations
Our project coordinator, Gianmaria Silvello, will be participating in the BRAINTEASER Impact and Exploitation Workshop set to take place on Day 1, 13 November. He will be one of the speakers participating in the first session, entitled “From Lab to Market – Unlocking the Translation of Research into Innovation”. In his speech he will be able to reflect the work carried out in the framework of the HEREDITARY project.
Alongside Gianmaria, several members of the HEREDITARY consortium will attend this unmissable event in the promotion of brain research and innovation. So don’t miss the opportunity and come to the event and make connections!
The event will take place in the EGG. Located in the heart of Brussels, the venue offers an outstanding space with easy access by train, public transport and car (with many different parking facilities in the vicinity). The perfect place to meet creative minds,exchange knowledge and experience.
The programme will include a wide array of session types, including plenary sessions, inspiring Brain Talks, Poster and Innovation Showcase, matchmaking and networking activities (guided and spontaneous), the Brain Innovation Days Pitch Competition, breakout sessions, panels, how-to sessions and others.
Registrations are still open! More information can be found here: Registration – Brain Innovation Days.
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