About

The aim of this course is to teach good practices in informatics to scientists whose primary field is not computer science.

Scientists increasingly need to rely on computer tools to perform their research. However, they often lack a formal education on how to design and use computer software efficiently and reliably. Every step is an analysis pipeline should be easily reproducible, but this is often not the case.

We aim at teaching researchers a few basic concepts and tools which will help them to improve their use of computer resources by

• Automating repetitive tasks
• Documenting, testing and keeping track of program code
• Making it easier to reuse and share their code.

The course does not aim at teaching everything in a few days, but at exposing the researchers to some key ideas and making them well-equipped to learn by themselves what they will still miss at the end of the course.

All the materials used during the preparation of the course are available as a GitHub repository.

Who is teaching this course?

Carlos Peña and Matthieu Bruneaux are biologists who learnt about informatics on the way, as programming skills were becoming necessary for their research projects. Tiina Sävilammi is a bioinformatics research assistant providing expertise for many research projects in the PnP group.

Who can attend this course?

There is no need for prior experience with programming to attend the course. The course is open to everybody, students and researchers. There is no registration fee, but we expect people who enroll to attend or to warn us in advance if they can't.

Where and when is it taking place?

The course will take place in the Genetics seminar room in Pharmacity (Turku, Finland) from the 21st to the 23rd of April 2015 (three full days in a row).

The Genetics seminar room is located on the 7th floor of the Pharmacity building (Google maps).

The course will be from 9am to 17pm, with a one-hour lunch break and some coffee breaks along the way. People can stay after the course (17pm-18pm) if they have some questions on what was taught during the day.

How much credits can I get from the course?

The plan is to provide 2 credits to students attending the three days and fulfilling the homework tasks. For more information, please contact Niklas Wahlberg who is the responsible person for the students.