Earlham Institute is leading a visionary workshop in Bogota from 26th to 28th June. The workshop will involve a multidisciplinary team of Colombian and international experts to understand user needs and available resources, discuss innovative solutions, and design a strategy to grow research capacity for the high-throughput computational analysis of biological data in Colombia.
This workshop will be an opportunity for intensive discussions to uncover innovative solutions, identify critical partners and produce a realistic strategy and open vision for a future Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) in Colombia, with recommendations about:
- Challenges, priorities, and opportunities for a research cyberinfrastructure in Colombia.
- Needs and opportunities in capacity building, such as networking, training, technology, etc.
- Partners, stakeholders and opportunities to prospectively work on these as focused communities.
In 2017, a multinational team lead by our Director of Science Federica Di Palma at Earlham Institute was awarded a Research Capacity Building GCRF project (GROW Colombia) by Research Councils UK to grow research skills, partnerships, and technological self-sufficiency in Colombia. This workshop is part of Earlham Institute’s commitment to grow research capacity building in Colombia, organised in collaboration with key local partners and the research network BRIDGE Colombia.
Around 30 Colombian and international experts and participants will attend the workshop. Relevant stakeholders include researchers, service providers, biotech businesses and government bodies. Participants will be directly invited or selected through a public open application. A travelling and accommodation allowance is available for participants from outside Bogota DC if required. Further information on the process and application criteria can be found here.
What is RCI Colombia?
RCI Colombia aims to meet the requirements and needs of the life science community in Colombia and beyond through democratised access to computational resources.
Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) is defined as a “technological and sociological” research ecosystem that supports data services, including acquisition, storage, management, analysis, and visualization. Importantly, it is designed to support remote collaborations and virtual organizations
Today’s huge datasets and complex analysis are beyond the scope of a single institution, and there is a pressing need to address the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people. Without common building blocks, research groups tend to adopt different formats and representations of key information, and build their own application and middleware software. As a result, their reconciliation or combination becomes difficult to achieve, leading to wasted effort and time.
The main goal of RCI Colombia is to enable data-driven scientific discovery. The RCI will not just involve installations of advanced computational tools, but will also represent the body of people required to run tools and resources in a sustainable, secure and interoperable way.
