For the first event after its launch last week, I am happy to invite you with Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) to an afternoon of round tables and workshops to open the collaboration around the construction of JOGL itself.

|| On the agenda ||

During this very special event, experts in open science, collective intelligence, social impact and platform design will share their experience and exchange with the participants around two round tables and a workshop.

The first round table will open discussions about how to enhance collective intelligence for social impact. In particular, how we can facilitate “giant” collaborations around the globe. The second round table will reflect on how to design digital platforms to implement collective intelligence at scale, in the context of open science. After a coffee break, the afternoon will end with a workshop where participants will have the possibility to test the JOGL platform, provide feedback and share with the team what features they would dream to see on JOGL.

The idea? JOGL is a platform with a strong vision but a design in constant construction. This event aims to give the opportunity to all to participate in this design and help build the future of the JOGL platform. As such, feedback shared by participants will be taken into consideration to serve as a roadmap for the implementation of the upcoming features of JOGL and make it the platform everyone needs.

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This Wednesday 17 October, I will talk (in French) about hubs and network science at the interdisciplinary co-working space “Le Onzieme Lieu” in Paris. The talk will be in French and for a lay audience. After the talk, we will organise a network game with Liuba Tupikina and there will be an exhibit of network art by Roberto Toro and Katja Heuer, all colleagues from the CRI. The place is fantastic, as it mixes a traditional co-working space setup with artist galleries. Come hang with us and discuss networks!

This work (pdf) was done during my postdoc at the BarabasiLab. We investigated the role of network topology in accurately predicting perturbation patterns in biological network. Indeed, the development of high-throughput technologies has allowed mapping a significant proportion of interactions between biochemical entities in the cell. In short, we begin to have a good mapping of the subcellular “interacotme”. However, it is unclear how much information is lost given the lack of measurements on the kinetic parameters governing the dynamics of these interactions. Using biochemical networks with experimentally measured kinetic parameters, we show that a knowledge of the network topology offers 65–80% accuracy in predicting the impact of perturbation patterns. In other words, we can use the increasingly accurate topological models to approximate perturbation patterns, bypassing expensive kinetic constant measurement. These results could open new avenues in modeling drug action and in identifying drug targets relying on the human interactome only.

This paper (pdf) is a result of a collaboration between the Sharma Lab at Harvard Medical School and the Renz group at Philipps University Marburg. In this work, I developed IDEAL, a method to predict the role of micro-RNAs (miRNAs) in a disease based on their topological impact in the interactome, and not on their fold-change. The method was applied in the case of asthma, based on an experimental setup and validation done by Ayşe Kılıç (a massive work!). We found that a cocktail of 5 miRNAs identified as having large topological impact, but not large expression fold-change, led to a sharp reduction of the asthmatic Th2 phenotype.

The network medicine satellite “NetMed18: Personalized Medicine in the Era of Big Data” at the NetSci18 conference was a success! With talks ranging from interactome and patient network approaches, social media and word embedding, brain stimulation, genetics and molecular biology… The multi-faceted approaches to network medicine were well represented! Can’t wait for next year 🙂