Sano Science Day 2023: Great Review of Achievements
With the end of 2023, a grant agreement awarded to Sano by the International Research Agendas programme which provides support for specialised, independent research units in Poland, will also come to an end. Because of this, Sano takes different steps to summarise and evaluate the achievements of almost four years of work supported by the grant. The premiere Sano Science Day, which took place on 29 November 2023, was one of the biggest events dedicated to this purpose. It was a great moment to verify that our work goes according to the research agenda or even outperforms our initial plans.
Sano Science Day 2023 gathered about 80 participants not only from Sano but also from partner institutions and other scientific and educational centres.
In his opening words, the scientific affairs director of Sano, Dr. Marian Bubak, emphasised that one of the main objectives of Sano is excellent science and the whole event was constructed as a full-scale conference in computational medicine.
We had the pleasure of listening to excellent guest speakers: Prof. Jose Mendes from the University of Aveiro, a famous specialist in complex networks, and Prof. Ewa Deelman from the University of Southern California, a world-known specialist in distributed computing. Those keynote lectures were given among over 30 presentations by members of Sano research groups: Personal Health Data Science, Health Informatics, Computer Vision Data Science, Extreme-scale Data and Computing, and finally Clinical Data Science. An additional slot was dedicated to the work of Scientific Programmers, the powerhouse of Sano’s software development. The speeches and posters presented at the event have shown that the research topics of Sano cover a huge variety of applications of computer science, VR, modelling, simulation, Machine Learning, etc. in almost any possible medical field: from diagnostics to treatment, from medical training to the prevention of diseases. Members of the Sano’s International Scientific Committee (ISC) were also present to have a first-hand account of our research achievements; we appreciated the in-person participation of Prof. Irena Roterman-Konieczna, Prof. Zbigniew Nawrat and Prof. Jacek Kitowski, with other members of the ISC joining on-line.
Some of the research results have already found partners among clinical institutions. The Comprehensive Abstraction and Classification Tool for Uncovering Structures (CACTUS)project of the Personal Health Data Science team, the Virtual Reality training simulator for spina bifida repair surgery, developed by the Health Informatics group, or the Automatic 3D tooth segmentation project of the same group, are just some examples.
Most Sano projects are progressing in collaboration with outstanding research institutions, including the University of Sheffield and Juelich Supercomputing Center, both having their participants at the event. The research teams of Sano are proud to contribute to the work of international consortiums, like In Silico World or NEARDATA project.
After all, Sano Science Day 2023 gave a great opportunity for all Sano teams to take a look back on what has already been done and what can be done for the progress of computational medicine in the future.
We gratefully acknowledge Randox Laboratories Ltd. (UK) as the sponsor of Sano Science Day 2023. Sano also thanks the Faculty of Computer Science AGH, Krakow, for hosting the event!
