Opening a Cabinet of Curiosities in Montreal Readers of this blog must know every summer the GigaScience Press team gathers at the ISMB (International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, where the great and good of computational biology gather for the largest bioinformatics conference of the year.

GitHub recently previewed ‘Copilot Workspace’, which aims to use generative AI to assist software developers. Rather than just giving in-line suggestions, as GitHub copilot does, workspace allows users to map out and execute entire projects. We got early preview access to the tool, so decided to see how well it performed for our needs in Epiverse-TRACE.

Plant phenotyping – the science of gathering precise information and measurements on plants – has seen massive improvements recently, and the combination of sensor technology and AI methods will continue to change the way crops are assessed and improved. A new article in GigaScience demonstrates where this is going: Jonas Bömer and colleagues at the Institute of Sugar Beet Research (Göttingen) used

The 8th World Congress on Research Integrity (WCRI) took place in Athens, Greece from 1st-5th June. GigaScience Press are regular attendees of this conference, and this year our organisation was represented by GigaScience Editor-in-Chief Scott Edmunds, Executive Editor Nicole Nogoy, and Data Scientist Chris Armit.

Enoch’s Hammer of Luddite fame, at the Tolson Memorial Museum. I gave a talk at the Pint of Science Festival – an international science festival that takes places at local pubs and cafes across the world – this evening.

Using Mistral for Data tagging Author · Xuzeng He ( ORCID: 0009–0005–7317–7426) Introduction Data tagging, in simple terms, is the process of assigning labels or tags to your data so that they are easier to retrieve or analyse.

The Annual International Biocuration Conference (AIBC) was held for the first in India, at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad and co-hosted by the Department of Plant Molecular Biology, University of Delhi South Campus. As usual, GigaDB had representation at the event (see write-ups of many previous meetings here), Mary Ann Tuli and Chris Hunter. Both of whom were wearing two hats!

Künstliche Intelligenz, aber reguliert? Die EU legt die weltweit erste Verordnung vor, um die Potentiale und Risiken von KI-Systemen gesetzlich zu regeln. Der AI-Act enthält Transparenz-Pflichten für KI-Anbieter, Regelungen zu Deep Fakes, hohem Energieverbrauch und zu einigem mehr. KI-Systeme wie beispielsweise ChatGPT können Bewerbungen schreiben, Reisen planen, Studienarbeiten verfassen und sogar Kunstwerke nachahmen oder Stimmen imitieren.

Sourcely, an AI company, promises to streamline research by finding, summarizing, and adding credible sources in minutes. While this sounds appealing, skepticism arises as using such a tool may prioritize citing over genuine research. Initial tests revealed limited functionality, leaving doubts about its practical value in the research process.

The awesome thing about language is that, well, we all mostly speak it, to some extent or another. This gives us an immensely powerful tool to manipulate transformational tasks. For the purposes of this post, I consider a transformational task to be essentially anything that takes an input and is largel intended to return some version of the same thing. This is not a very precise definition, but it will have to do for now.