June didn’t only bring an early summer, but also the second edition of the de.NBI “Learnathon” of DAIS (Dresden Analysis-of-Images Suite) to the Center for Systems Biology Dresden, which is located right next to the MPI-CBG. From 4th to 8th June, the hands-on course introduced 25 participants to the ecosystem around Fiji, ImageJ2 and KNIME – open-source software applications to advance bioimage analysis for scientific projects. Particularly, the attendees learned about the core libraries and concepts behind those analysis tools, and which software engineering infrastructure is commonly used.
Guided by experienced leaders in the community the participants from Germany, the Czech Republic, India and Canada were able to program own plug-ins and scripts during various workshops and sessions. The course also aimed at integrating newcomers into the existing community and showing its potential for collaboration, and synergetic exchange. A warm summer night out in the “Neustadt” - Dresden's famous nightlife quarter – added to this aspect of the agenda.
“We were stunned by the skills and in-depth questions the participants raised during the course. It was a fantastic week and we can’t wait to see the follow-up work in the individual project implementations now”, Deborah Schmidt, one of the organizers from Florian Jug's group said.
The DAIS Lernathon series was successfully launched in 2017, and is repeated in annual intervals. We are already looking forward to next year’s event!