More than 200 participants joined the two-day conference taking place at Casino Bern. The rich programme featured keynote speeches and invited talks, poster sessions and a panel discussion on challenges and strategies for a collaborative and sustainable data science ecosystem in Switzerland.
In an effort to foster a multidisciplinary community around data science for scientific discovery, the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) and the University of Bern hosted the first Data Science for the Sciences (DS4S) conference in April in Bern.
The two keynote speakers Prof. Mihaela van der Schaar, Professor of Machine Learning, AI and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, and Prof. Gustau Camps, Professor in Electrical Engineering at the University of Valencia, set the scene. Invited talks gathered experts from research institutions across Switzerland presenting Data-Science-related research in various applications encompassing Robotics, Language Modeling, Environmental Modelling, Personalized Medicine, and more.
“We are very glad to have shared these two days with participants from so many institutions, and to see a community emerge that includes researchers in statistical data science, machine learning, AI, and beyond, collaborating with domain scientists and also researchers carrying out interdisciplinary research at the interface between data science and their domain”, said the conference chairs Prof. David Ginsbourger (UniBE) and Prof. Guillaume Obozinski (SDSC).
“Our goal was to introduce a new conference format that gathers the community of researchers - from Switzerland and beyond - working in Data Science with applications in sciences in general,” explained Prof. Guillaume Obozinski, Deputy Executive Director and Chief Data Scientist at the SDSC.
Prof. David Ginsbourger, Director of Studies in Statistics at the University of Bern, continued: “Fostering collaborative efforts in Data Science is increasingly necessary today to achieve meaningful and impactful results, and we believe that this conference can play a part in stimulating this exchange.”
“We would like to warmly thank the speakers, the poster presenters, and also the audience for the great and varied discussions that took place within DS4S. We are also deeply grateful to our teams and supporting institutions: without them, such a première would not have been possible!”
DS4S is co-organized and mainly funded by the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) and the University of Bern. It is also supported by the National Open Research Data Strategy Council, by the Hasler Foundation, and by Bern's Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.
Complementing the rich discussions and presentations, data scientists could participate in poster sessions with attractive prizes. The winners in the two poster categories can be found here.
After the inaugural success, the organization team plans to host the next DataScience4Science conference in spring 2025.
A specific date will be announced at a later stage. Should you already be interested in joining the next edition, please reach out to communications@datascience.ch.
