Webvalley 2021 ready to kick off
The 19 participants of the online edition that will take place from 16 to 28 August have been selected
The Webvalley 2021 team is ready: out of a total of 47 applications received (13 females, 34 males), 19 decidedly well-matched by gender (6 females and 13 males), educational background and geographical origin were selected. The participants from Trentino will in fact be joined by companions from other Italian regions but also from the United States (5 participants), Brazil (1 participant) and Russia (1 participant), and all will be guided in the week of applied research by the staff of FBK and Istituto Pavoniano Artigianelli of Trento. In the selection of foreign participants, this year’s collaboration with Regeneron ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) was joined by that with FBJC (Feira Brasileira de Jovens Cientistas).
The theme of the current edition is the – very topical – application of artificial intelligence to the fields of health and precision medicine and will be analyzed with the help of researchers from FBK and colleagues from other Italian and international laboratories. The young participants will have to develop, implement and validate artificial intelligence algorithms aimed at tracing early signs of the onset of comorbidities in diabetic patients starting from their medical history (healthcare trajectory), collected in digital medical records. The team will deepen the use of the computational tools necessary to analyze and give meaning to data, i.e. data science and high-quality machine / deep learning and collaborative software solutions created by the participants themselves, all after having received the necessary sector knowledge and useful and effective operational, communicative and organizational tools.
During the camp, participants will develop technical data science skills, gaining work experience on machine learning methodologies for life sciences (thanks also to the participation of tutors from Bristol Medical School – University of Bristol), including reproducibility and interpretability of data, privacy for health AI solutions (thanks to the contribution of the Security & Trust unit of the FBK Cybersecurity Center on privacy and security issues), and the basis for implementing cloud models.
Furthermore, a certain space will be reserved for scientific communication and experience: the school program includes a scientific communication module, organized by the Arditodesìo Association of Trento and, as for some years now, one participant has been selected to cover the specific role of Communication Officer of the team.
Considering the pandemic situation, as last year the management of the Summer School decided to create the camp remotely, proposing the formula of the WebValley 2020 scattered lab: the team of girls and boys will be distributed and will follow the program from their home countries, with the core of tutors connected by a base camp (HEAD OFFICE) hosted at the Artigianelli Institute of Trento, thanks to the fruitful collaboration established in recent years.
The boys, in a video made to collect their expectations and the reasons that led them to apply, declared themselves curious to undertake this new experience, in particular for the fact that they will be working side by side with real experts in the sector, with whom they will be able to consolidate the knowledge already acquired and learn new ones. Furthermore, thinking about solutions that aim to improve public health and concretely help people are other driving forces of no small importance for the participants.
Finally, they are all also very enthusiastic about the idea of working together and getting to know each other, albeit at a distance due to the pandemic situation still underway.
Two very intense and challenging, but at the same time funny, weeks ahead, which will become part of the cultural background – but also of the memories, the dear ones – of our 19 participants.
As a partner of the initiative, Microsoft will provide MS Teams tools for videoconferencing, teamwork and sharepoint for documents and cloud computing tools on the Microsoft Azure platform for scientific analysis and project development.
The initiative takes place under the patronage of the Autonomous Province of Trento.