I actually made a mistake in the last post, saying that that lecture – at Öredev, Malmö, Sweden – was the third and last invited lecture that week. There was actually a fourth one upcoming: in China. This time it was at an international workshop on Digital therapeutics, i.e. eHealth and apps. It was largely focused on existing technologies, i.e. not only scientists were there, but also a lot of companies with products already on the markt, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, from the US. My lecture was given online, but a partner of mine went over there in person, to also have physical meetings, and to also help set up meetings in the New York/Boston area, to which I am travelling in the end of the month.
So – four invited presentations in one week, in four different cities, across two continents. I think that is actually a personal record 🙂
Today is the third and last public invited lecture this week. This time it is down in Hyllie, which is very close to the bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen, i.e. right on the border between the Sweden and Denmark. This lecture is again on our digital twins, and this time it is in a software and AI conference: Øredev 2024. This is a “normal” conference, which is not targeting scientists, but the general public, i.e. companies and normal citizen who are interested in software development and AI innovations, etc. This is fitting, because our research is turning increasingly more towards eHealth and app development, and even towards commercial app development via our spin-off companies. For this reason, we are also nowadays actively recruiting software and UX developers, and quite generally moving into a more public phase, targeting companies and the general public as potential customers and business partners, etc.
Picture by Roland Betnér. Program and more info for the event is available here: https://oredev.org/
Today I, Gunnar Cedersund, am giving a lecture on digital twins in the beautiful city of Malå, up in the North of Sweden. The lecture is part of a week they have on the potential of AI in our evolving societies. Today’s event starts with a lecture on AI, then I talk about our digital twins, and finally there will be a panel debate, where also some politicians participate. Here is a link to the event, which I think is only attendable in person, even though my lecture and participation will be done via teams.
On Friday, Gunnar Cedersund will give a lecture in the NBIS AI seminar series. NBIS is the National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden, which is a core-facility spread out over all universities in Sweden. In other words, at each university in Sweden, there are some local bioinformaticians located, which helps out in projects. NBIS also arranges a seminar series on artificial intelligence (AI), and the next such lecture – on Friday May 17, at 10AM CET – features Gunnar Cedersund. Gunnar will talk about our digital twins, and about how they can be used to integrate a variety of data, both classical bioinformatics multi-omics data and behavioral and imaging data, into a personal data vault, and into a personalized copy of a patients. More information, abstract, and link to the online lecture is available here: https://scilifelab.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IJC/pages/2780758082/Meeting+59+2024-05-17
Sundqvist N, Grankvist N, Watrous J, Mohit J, Nilsson R, Cedersund G. Validation-based model selection for 13C metabolic flux analysis with uncertain measurement errors. PLoS Comput Biol. 2022 Apr 11;18(4):e1009999. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009999
Author summary: Measuring metabolic reaction fluxes in living cells is difficult, yet important. The gold standard is to label extracellular metabolites with 13C, to use mass spectrometry to find out where the 13C-atoms ends up, and finally use mathematical modelling to calculate how quickly each reaction must have flowed, for the 13C-atoms to end up like that. This measurement thus relies on usage of the right mathematical model, which must be selected among various candidate models. In this manuscript, we present a new way to do this model selection step, utilizing validation data. Using an adopted approach to calculate the uncertainty of model predictions, we identify new validation experiments, which are neither too similar, nor too dissimilar, compared to the previous training data. The model candidate that is best at predicting this new validation data is the one chosen. Tests on simulated data where the true model is known, shows that the validation-based method is robust when the magnitude of the error in the measurement uncertainty is unknown, something that conventional methods are not. This improvement is important since true uncertainties can be difficult to estimate for these data. Finally, we demonstrate how the new method can be used on real data, to identify fluxes and important reactions.
There are quite a few public lectures planned for this autumn, and one of the ones I am looking forward to a little bit extra is the MBM workshop, in Gothenburg, on October 15-16, 2020. MBM stands for Modelling in Biology and Medicine, and this is the second edition of the workshop. The workshop started as an initiative by a couple of enthusiastic Ph.D. students at the Math Department at Chalmers/Gothenburg University. But since it turned out so successful, they easily got both the support by the more senior leadership at the department, and enough positive feedback to decide to do a second edition. I really liked attending it last year, both since it was a Swedish workshop on systems biology, which means that it helps foster and grow the Swedish systems biology community, and since they managed to create a nice and cosy athmosphere. Partially because of this, the post-conference informal conversations last year led to me mentioning some of the bigger plans I am working on, which are going to become more public this year.
My dual life: scientist by day, pianist by night. Now they are starting to come together at last!
Those plans involve me combining my science and create careers into one, by doing joint lecture-performances, mixing piano, dancing, and digital twin-based stories. The original plan for this year’s workshop was to do some version of such a lecture-performance at the physical workshop. But since the physical edition had to be cancelled – due to the pandemic – the lecture will be held online. Nevertheless, in the presentation text of me at the home page, my CV covers – for the first time in a scientific event! – both my science and creative careers are mentioned side by side, and as two parts of the same thing. Already this feels really cool! And during the lecture, I plan to say, and probably also show, something short about those new and border-crossing plans in action. The workshop is held completely online, so you will be able to see it, also if you are not living in Sweden. And, later in the autumn, a more proper trailer for the first such lecture-performance will be released. The first proper such lecture-performance is planned be held during the autumn of 2021.
An exciting autumn awaits! And, the workshop is still open for abstract submissions!
We have gotten a new grant! The money this time comes from ELLIIT, which is a joint technology programme for Linköping, Lund, Halmstad University, and Blekinge Institute of Technology. The project we applied for is called “Usable digital twins in healthcare“, and it will focus on solving the many different practical challenges involved in bringing our digital twins into actual clinical practice: involving e.g. legal, technical, and ethical issues. A summary of the project and its main steps is given in the figure below. The funding is 2 MSEK, i.e. 200 kEUR/kUSD over a two-year period.
