The Annual International Conference on Critical Assessment of Massive Data Analysis (CAMDA), to be held on 28-30 July 2021, presents new techniques in the field of bioinformatics, data analysis, and statistics for the handling and processing of large data sets, the combination of multiple data sources, and effective computational inference.

What is CAMDA?

CAMDA focuses on one of the grand challenges of our time, the intelligent exploitation of Big Data in the life sciences. In the post-genomic era, an effective scientific interpretation of large datasets is key to new medical and biological insights from novel high throughput assays and the increasing size of biomedical studies. CAMDA puts a spotlight on the successful analysis and integration of the massive data sets now prevalent in the life sciences. CAMDA is an established full conference track at ISMB, representing one of its Communities of Special Interests (COSIs).

Come join us this year, we look forward to your participation! Attend and contribute to CAMDA.

This year's challenges

This year, recognizing the recent events, the scientific committee of CAMDA has set four data analysis contest challenges:

• The Disease Maps to modelling COVID-19 Challenge provides expert-curated molecular mechanistic maps for COVID-19 and large scale expression profiles. Combine them to expand our understanding of COVID-19 mechanisms – we can test the best suggestions experimentally!
• The Literature AI for Drug-Induced Liver Injury Challenge provides biomedical publications curated by FDA experts on DILI. Build their digital twin to distinguish positives from a challenging negative set!
• The Metagenomic Phage Forensics of Anti-Microbial Resistance Challenge features diverse meta-genomics profiles from urban areas. Track emerging AMR and its spread by gene transfer through phages!
• The Hi-Res Cancer Data Integration Challenge presents clinical and matched molecular profiles, with read level data for individual genomes as well as expression estimated from novel genomic regions. Explore non-standard genomes and splicing events for better prognosis!

CAMDA encourages an open contest, where all analyses of the contest data sets are of interest, not limited to the questions suggested here. There is an online forum for the free discussion of the contest data sets and their analysis, in which you are encouraged to participate.

Organising Team

The whole of MCB's Bioinformatics Research Group team is taking the main organisational responsibilities this year. Group Leader, Dr hab. Paweł Łabaj has been involved in the CAMDA for more than a decade and for several years he is the main co-organiser. Two of the announced competition tasks are prepared by members of the Group. The Literature AI for Drug-Induced Liver Injury Challenge has major contributions from Witold Wydmański and the Metagenomic Phage Forensics of Anti-Microbial Resistance Challenge from Michał Kowalski.