June 21-23, 2021

Organized by: Prof. Uri Hershberg, Department of Human Biology

The study of biology is at a turning point. Novel experimental methods make possible high-throughput imaging and molecular measurement at the single cell and single molecule level over thousands and millions of cells. Along with the great promise these technologies bring, they also call for new approaches to catalyze the assimilation of this overwhelming wealth of data. With new tools to measure biological dynamics and diversity new questions arise. Questions of process that take into account changes in individual molecules in the context of cell behavior and changes in individual cells in the context of systemic responses to physiological change. However, to even start to define these questions we need new ways to look at the data in its full richness. We need to visualize what we have measured.
For the last 3 years in Philadelphia and Haifa (and now Porto) we have invited biology, computer science and design students to form interdisciplinary groups that together created new methods for the visualization of the changes in individually characterized Immune cell populations (http://artathon.stochasticity.org). Our focus thought out has been to visualize B cell receptor (antibody) populations that can number in the millions for a single experiments. 

This is a special case of the more general question –   How can we visualize millions of individuals? Which we divided into two sub questions: 

(i) How do we create an interactive visualization of the diversity of a population taking into account the different known characteristics of the individuals that build it? 

(ii) How do we create an interactive visualization of the comparison of two populations? 

(For a more detailed description of our questions – http://clash.biomed.drexel.edu/artathon/) 

This year, thanks to the pandemic, the Artathon was a hybrid events with small groups working together and in parallel on the east coast of the USA, in Porto in Portugal and here at the University of Haifa Namal Campus. The hybrid nature of the Artathon actually enhanced the collaboration and 4 interesting projects were built, two of which are still continuing one as a project in my lab and another as a proposed M.Sc. topic @INSEC TEC in Porto  (to see some of what was developed and conceptualized go here-  https://github.com/Artathon2021   and to see the miro shared whiteboard we used to discuss things here-  https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lDLfORU=/