Looking at life in context: computational biology and artificial intelligence break new ground
Earlier this year, EMBL – the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, a collaborator in some of INESC-ID’s research programs, including OLISSIPO – launched its new strategic programme for 2022-2026, Molecules to Ecosystems, calling it “a new era for European molecular biology”, under which EMBL proposes to expand its scope by “looking at life in context”. (The announcement of the new strategic programme was coupled with a new year piece by Edith Heard, the director-general of EMBL, published in Nature, suggesting a more integrative approach to the study of life)
Many of these future and innovative “ways of seeing” are only available via – and due to – computational biology and artificial intelligence, areas in which INESC-ID has active research programmes and expertise. As EMBL elaborates, “Advances in computational power and artificial intelligence […] enable rigorous analysis and creative integration of these [i.e., biological] data. This tremendous technological progress in life sciences can now be coupled with the capacity to gather and analyse data of greater scope, resolution, and quality than ever before.”
A recent paper authored by several OLISSIPO members mirrors EMBL’s strategy of dynamically “looking at life in context”. Totoro: Identifying Active Reactions During the Transient State for Metabolic Perturbations, published in Frontiers in Genetics, offers a novel, open source method to analyse metabolomic data, successfully predicting the dynamics of known active metabolic pathways. The authors reaffirm the need for a wide and integrative view of big biological data: “With the current technologies, it gets more common to have different kinds of data available which creates a need for methods that combine, for instance, metabolomic, transcriptomic and proteomic data.” Research as that developed by OLISSIPO researchers brings us closer to that reality.
Coordinated by Susana Vinga – INESC-ID researcher and member of its Board of Directors, as well as Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico – OLISSIPO is a Twinning project, funded by the European Commission within Horizon 2020, that aims to enhance the competences in Computational Biology at INESC-ID and to create an international pole of excellence in multi-disciplinary science in Portugal. The Olissipo consortium is composed of four research institutions: INESC-ID, EMBL, ETH Zurich and Inria.
Upcoming Events
Educational Workshop on Responsible AI for Peace and Security (UNODA)
On June 6 and 7, The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) are offering a selected group of technical students the opportunity to join a 2-day educational workshop on Responsible AI for peace and security.
The third workshop in the series will be held in Porto Salvo, Portugal, in collaboration with GAIPS, INESC-ID, and Instituto Superior Técnico. The workshop is open to students affiliated with universities in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and Africa, Oceania, and Asia.
Date & Time: June 6 a 7
Where: IST – Tagus Park, Porto Salvo
Registration deadline: April 8
Summary: “As with the impacts of Artificial intelligence (AI) on people’s day-to-day lives, the impacts for international peace and security include wide-ranging and significant opportunities and challenges. AI can help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but its dual-use nature means that peaceful applications can also be misused for harmful purposes such as political disinformation, cyberattacks, terrorism, or military operations. Meanwhile, those researching and developing AI in the civilian sector remain too often unaware of the risks that the misuse of civilian AI technology may pose to international peace and security and unsure about the role they can play in addressing them. Against this background, UNODA and SIPRI launched, in 2023, a three-year educational initiative on Promoting Responsible Innovation in AI for Peace and Security. The initiative, which is supported by the Council of the European Union, aims to support greater engagement of the civilian AI community in mitigating the unintended consequences of civilian AI research and innovation for peace and security. As part of that initiative, SIPRI and UNODA are organising a series of capacity building workshops for STEM students (at PhD and Master levels). These workshops aim to provide the opportunity for up-and-coming AI practitioners to work together and with experts to learn about a) how peaceful AI research and innovation may generate risks for international peace and security; b) how they could help prevent or mitigate those risks through responsible research and innovation; c) how they could support the promotion of responsible AI for peace and security.”