Introduction and moderation: Prof. Dr. Konrad Förstner
Konrad Förstner holds a joint professorship for Data and Information Literary at ZB MED – Information Center for Life Sciences and TH Köln.
The research of his group covers a broad spectrum of applications of data science, bioinformatics and systems biology methods in the life sciences. This includes the integration and interpretation of large data sets – mainly generated using high-throughput sequencing technologies but also biomedical text corpora – with the aim to translate them into novel biological and medical insights. Additionally, the group runs projects that use and extend the knowledge commons by making research outcomes more open and FAIR. Since more than a decade he is advocating open science with all its facetes (data, publications, source code of research software, educational resources, publication metrics etc.) and is active in several communites promoting and implementing this. Furthermore, he tries to empower others – researcher and people in information centric roles – by teaching digitial literacy and skills to work more efficiently and effectively with data, information and knowledge.