Project management is evolving rapidly with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), transforming how we plan, execute, and monitor projects. AI can enhance decision-making by analyzing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and predicting risks, allowing project managers to allocate resources more effectively and optimize timelines. This presentation will explore the key benefits of AI in project management, current trends, and how organizations can harness these innovations to improve efficiency, mitigate risks, and drive successful outcomes.

Sven Neumeyer will provide insights into enhancing the impact of a User Experience (UX) team in a product-centered scientific research organization at Novartis. He will outline a strategic playbook based on three fundamental principles: 1. organizational design, 2. the establishment of a framework, and 3. capability building. The presentation will showcase how the UX team not only improved their own skills but also empowered the broader research informatics organization. Join us to understand how to actualize the potential of a UX team and foster a collaborative and effective UX culture within any given product team in a scientific research environment.

In pharmaceutical early research, advanced software applications are essential for building robust data ecosystems, converting histology and high-content imaging into AI-driven insights. Histology reveals tissue architecture and disease markers, while high-content screening uses automated imaging to interpret cellular responses, speeding up drug discovery. At Novo Nordisk, we develop solutions that streamline data collection, storage, and analysis to enhance workflows and improve accessibility. To support this, we prioritize upskilling scientists through the Digital Science Academy’s platforms, ensuring they master in-house tools. This presentation highlights these strategies, driving collaboration and preparing our workspace for digital transformation.

In an industry where cutting edge scientific technologies, models, or frameworks are being released very frequently, there is an ever growing need to materialize innovative ideas into tangible end-to-end solutions for scientists, data scientists, or even executive leadership. Application development remains a strong cornerstone because of this, however, a development pipeline that allows for rapid prototyping, quick pivoting and effective stakeholder management is essential to guarantee the longevity of software apps even more so in this new age of data science solutions.

DashboardCentral and AssayCentral are in-house web tools developed for AbbVie scientists, providing a centralized hub for accessing internal preclinical data. They simplify data access with intuitive interfaces that enable efficient querying and interactive visualizations. DashboardCentral offers streamlined access to dashboards with data from Abbvie preclinical datamart, while AssayCentral facilitates the creation of standardized assay reports for project teams. Together, they enhance data presentation and accessibility across projects and enhance research outcomes for Discovery Scientists.

The renewed focus on making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) requires researchers to invest time and effort in describing, storing and appropriately sharing data products. This is often administrative overhead at the end of a project and results in less than FAIR data. We will describe how this overhead can be substantially reduced or eliminated by using data portal technology and services developed by Globus that allow data to be described and shared as an integral part of the research workflow, thereby making the data FAIR by default.

This talk chronicles the development journey of DaedalusData, an open-source platform for interactive exploration and labeling of large image collections. I'll share insights from the iterative design process that began with a simple prototype and evolved through various technical architectures before ultimately arriving at the right balance of capability and accessibility for research users. The presentation will highlight how finding the appropriate level of complexity—neither over-engineered nor oversimplified—was crucial to creating a tool that effectively serves scientific workflows. The core of the talk will demonstrate how DaedalusData enables interactive labeling and exploratory image analysis through dimensionality reduction and knowledge externalization techniques. Attendees will see how the platform allows researchers to efficiently explore patterns in image collections, create custom label alphabets, and externalize domain knowledge without requiring advanced technical expertise. The streamlined Docker-based deployment with Jupyter notebooks integration makes these powerful capabilities accessible to researchers across disciplines. Through practical examples, I'll show how interactive visual exploration significantly enhances the ability to discover meaningful patterns and efficiently create labeled datasets for downstream analysis.

AION Labs, a venture studio founded by major pharma companies, AWS, and leading VCs, has launched nine generative AI start-ups for drug discovery. This talk will highlight our unique co-development framework designed to streamline data sharing, software integration, and robust technology validation within pharma’s complex enterprise environments. We’ll share practical insights into successfully aligning agile startup innovation with pharma requirements, infrastructure constraints, and regulatory standards.

Since 2010, “Trends from the Trenches” has been a cornerstone of the Bio-IT program, delivering candid and occasionally blunt assessments of the most impactful and overhyped IT technologies in life sciences. This talk will provide a deep dive into computing, storage, cloud, data science, machine learning, and more, with a focus on supporting data-intensive science. Looking ahead, this talk will share forward-thinking predictions about emerging technologies and trends poised to shape the future of life sciences innovation, offering actionable insights for navigating the next wave of IT evolution.

Launching in 2026, a new AI supercomputer powered by Nvidia’s latest Rubin-generation GPUs will transform research at Oregon State University’s Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex. This mini talk highlights its capabilities, from accelerating protein structure prediction to advancing quantum simulations to something completely new and different. Learn how you can get access to this cutting-edge resource and drive innovation in life sciences and quantum computing simulations and discover opportunities to collaborate.

As the world's largest publicly available repository of raw sequence data, the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) plays a pivotal role in advancing public health and life sciences research. This presentation highlights state-of-the-art tools and strategies for managing and analyzing the SRA’s massive datasets, showcasing its impact on infectious disease surveillance, genomic epidemiology, and precision medicine. Discover how innovative informatics solutions are transforming raw data into actionable insights for global health challenges.

Many biologists who have spent years coding and thinking in terms of bioinformatics - protein and DNA sequence, genomics - are now engaging with machine learning, NLP, and LLMs. In this talk a bioinformaticist will talk about the many lessons learned and twists and turns encountered in these new fields. Topics will include new ways of thinking about computing with CPUs and GPUs, re-representing data, training, iteration and validation, version control and environments, new definitions of “pipeline”,  and coming face-to-face with prediction and statistics.