Thursday • October 2
9:00-9:15 • Welcome
Location: X Theatre
9:15-10:15 • Keynote • Visual Representations Addressing The Temporal Aspect Of Biomolecular Data • Barbora Kozlíková
Location: X Theatre • Chair: Renata G. Raidou
Abstract • When analyzing and exploring complex biological datasets, we often have to handle their temporal aspect, capturing the evolution of certain phenomena. Their proper visual representation and understanding can significantly influence the decision-making processes. In this talk, I will outline the issues and challenges in visualizing long and complex time series of biomolecular datasets and demonstrate possible solutions that have been developed in the past years.
Bio • Barbora Kozlikova is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. She a member of the Department of Visual Computing and is heading the Visitlab research group focusing on diverse topics in visualization. Barbora got her Ph.D. in Computer Graphics in 2011. Her main research interests are visualization and visual analysis with diverse application areas, including biochemistry, medicine, geography, and criminology. With her 7 Ph.D. students she is working on many interesting research topics. She is responsible for several courses taught at our faculty and I’m always interested in starting new collaborations. She has organized the EG EuroVis 2018 conference and also the EG VCBM 2019 workshop.
10:45-12:30 • Paper Session 1
Location: X Theatre
13:30-15:30 • Tutorial • Derya Akbaba & Laura Garrison • Implosion Method for SciVis: Transposing Methods for Reflexivity from Feminist Theory
Location: X Theatre
Abstract • While there is growing recognition in the visualization community for the need to consider alternative epistemologies in how we read and understand visualizations, only a few tools exist so far for taking theoretical ways of knowing into practice. In this tutorial, we show how the implosion method, an approach for reflexivity born from feminist theory, can be applied to visualization. We focus in particular on imploding visualizations of scientific data, as we see a mismatch between suggested methods from alternative epistemologies and datasets that are spatially-oriented, quantitative, and not explicitly about social and demographic characteristics of people. On completion of this tutorial, participants will have a foundation of the implosion method with its underpinnings in critical theory. This basic toolkit will allow participants to implode visualizations of their own scientific data and visualizations, to reveal personal biases or assumptions about the data through a variety of dimensions ranging from labor to history to politics. In revealing these dimen sions, we as a community can collectively tell better visual stories about our data to resolve and move past these (possibly) limiting assumptions.
16:00-17:00 • Keynote • Sara Colombo
Location: X Theatre • Chair: Laura Garrison
Bio • Dr. Sara Colombo is an Assistant Professor of Designing Responsible AI at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology. She is director of the Feminist Generative AI Lab at TU Delft. Her academic work investigates novel approaches, methodologies, and tools to design fair and ethical AI systems, empower individuals through AI, and shape AI futures through public engagement. Her research aims to merge data feminism and design futuring approaches to explore new ways to co-create more inclusive and just AI futures. She believes in the ability of design to envision future worlds and to inspire a more just and ethical development of technology for society.
17:00-18:00 • Posters and Reception
Location: X Café
Full detail can be found on the posters page.
Friday • October 3
9:00-10:00 • Keynote • High Dimensional Analysis Of The Human Intestinal Immune System Identifies A Disease Associated Network Of Immune Cell Subsets • Frits Koning
Location: X Theatre • Chair: Thomas Höllt
Abstract • The immune system protects us against invading pathogens and plays an important role in the eradication of particular types of tumors. On the other hand, dysregulated immune responses underlie the development of a large variety of immune mediated disorders like celiac disease, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel diseases. Also, novel approaches to enhance immune activity against cancer can lead to the development of autoimmunity, stressing the need to develop more tailored immune interventions to prevent such unwanted side effects. Much effort is thus focused on unraveling the positive and negative aspects of immune activation. For this novel technologies like single cell mass cytometry and RNA-sequencing are used to decipher the complexity of the immune system and the mechanisms that either enhance or dampen its activation. We have been using these technologies to collect data on the tissue resident immune populations in the intestine, the organ that contains the largest immune compartment in the human body. Here we have focused on gaining insight in the development of the human intestinal immune compartment and its involvement in inflammatory bowel disease. For the analysis of the complex datasets we have made use and developed tSNE-based tools. The results reveal a previously unappreciated complexity in the intestinal immune system and demonstrate that coordinated activity of a variety of immune subsets underlies disease activity. Moreover, we observed that dynamic monitoring of the development of the tSNE plots reveals potential developmental pathways that drive the generation of harmful immune populations while suppressing regulatory mechanisms. We anticipate that such results may ultimately be used to develop patient-specific immune interventions.
Bio • Frits Koning has been a staff member in the department of Immunology of the Leiden University Medical Centre since 1993. He was the CEO of the Dutch Celiac Disease Consortium (CDC) in which immunologists, geneticists, food specialists and medical doctors collaborated with industrial partners to improve the quality of life of patients with celiac disease. He is well recognized for his contributions to the field of immune mediated disorders, celiac disease in particular. Through his work it is now well established which gluten fragments are disease causative and how they are recognized by disease-related T cells, providing a molecular basis for the genetic association between HLA-DQ and celiac disease. In his most recent work he uses high dimensional flow and mass cytometry to unravel the involvement of the innate and adaptive immune system in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.
10:30-12:00 • Paper Session 2
Location: X Theatre
12:00-12:30 • Industry Session with Siemens Healthineers
Location: X Theatre
13:30-15:15 • Paper Session 3
Location: X Theatre
15:45-16:45 • Keynote • Geert-Jan Rutten
Location: X Theatre • Chair: Anna Vilanova
Bio • Geert-Jan Rutten is a neurosurgeon at Elisabeth-Tweesteden Hospital (ETZ) in Tilburg with a clinical and scientific focus on the relationship between brain structure and function. He specializes in awake brain tumor surgery and deep brain stimulation. His research employs advanced neuroimaging techniques such as functional MRI and tractography to understand how neurological and cognitive functions are affected by brain tumors and surgery. Dr. Rutten has co-led multiple interdisciplinary projects to develop personalized, image-guided neurosurgical tools based on the human connectome. He holds a professorship at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at TU Eindhoven, bridging clinical neuroscience with computational modeling.
16:30-17:15 • Closing
Location: X Theatre