🧬 Our group had a great time participating in BITS2026, the 22nd Annual Conference of the Bioinformatics Italian Society, held in Padua from May 27–29, 2026.
The conference provided an excellent opportunity to share our latest research, exchange ideas with colleagues, and connect with the vibrant Italian and international bioinformatics community.
A special highlight was the 2nd International BioHackathon, organized by our group members Giulia Cesaro and Giacomo Bruzzo in collaboration with Young BITS, CINI Young InfoLife, and ISCB RSG Italy. Bringing together talented young scientists from across Italy and Europe, the BioHackathon challenged participants to decode biological networks from omics data through collaboration, creativity, and innovation. The event showcased the enthusiasm and scientific excellence of the next generation of computational biologists.
🎤 We were also proud to see our PhD student Matteo Andriolo present our work on ArchetypalC, a scalable and high-performance C++ implementation of Archetypal Analysis for large-scale bioinformatics applications. ArchetypalC supports sparse matrices, parallel computation, and interactive visualization, enabling efficient exploration of complex biological datasets.
Our group also contributed with two additional posters:
🎤 Elena Marinello presented GRAPHIA, a pipeline for deriving patient-specific network features by weighting a shared biological interaction graph according to individual gene expression profiles.
🎤 Mikele Milia presented scTransformer, a novel framework for SingleCellTranscriptomics that incorporates prior biological knowledge into the self-attention mechanism of Transformer models.
