fosdem-bioinformatics

Call for Participation: 1st Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Developer Room at FOSDEM 2026

The Bioinformatics and Computational Biology FOSDEM community is pleased to announce the 1st edition of our DevRoom and invite participants to submit proposals for talks for the event. It will take place on January, 31st in Belgium, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in the afternoon.

General Information about FOSDEM

FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event organized annually in Brussels, Belgium. It brings together 8000+ open source developers and enthusiasts from around the world. No registration or payment is necessary. FOSDEM provides a unique opportunity for developers and communities to meet, share knowledge, and promote the development and benefits of open source solutions.

Bioinformatics & Computational Biology

Over the past two decades, biology has been transformed by high-throughput technologies that generate vast amounts of data. This revolution created demand for efficient algorithms, parallel computing infrastructures (GPUs, HPC, cloud platforms), and sophisticated software tools. Open-source software is integral to this landscape.

Bioinformatics bridges engineering, computer science, and biology. We define it broadly to encompass:

• Genomics
• Medical imaging (ie Radiology, digital Pathology)
• AI-driven protein research
• Medical informatics and med-tech
• ... Any field at the intersection of the Life Sciences and technology that has a FOSS angle

The Devroom

Following a successful Birds of a Feather session at FOSDEM 2025 that drew dozens of attendees from diverse backgrounds, we're launching a dedicated Bioinformatics & Computational Biology devroom. It focuses on sharing and collaboration in the life sciences, covering:

• Best practices and emerging approaches
• FOSS projects and tools
• Workflow Management & HPC
• Reproducibility and open science
• Software Engineering and UX
• AI & Machine Learning applications
• Visualization and interactive tools

Call for presentations

Submission deadline: November 30, 2025

We invite proposals from developers, researchers, and any enthusiasts working with open source tools in the life sciences. Whether you're from academia, industry, or the public sector, we want to hear about:

• Technical presentations on FOSS bioinformatics tools and projects
• Tutorials and demos of workflows, pipelines, infrastructure or software
• Best practices in reproducibility, performance optimization, or collaboration
• Experience reports from production systems or large-scale deployments
• Technologies like ML/AI

We especially encourage submissions that:

• Address practical challenges with real-world solutions
• Cover the biological context driving computational choices
• Showcase cross-disciplinary collaboration
• Highlight lessons learned from FOSS development in life sciences

We have several talk Formats:

• Standard talks: 20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A
• Short talks: 10 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A
• Lightning talks: 5 minutes "Your project in 1 slide" (perfect for introducing new tools, seeking collaborators, or sparking discussions which can be continued in the hallway)

Note: All talks will be live-streamed and recorded (audio+video). By submitting, you agree to being recorded and that your content will be published under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.

How to submit a talk

• Go to FOSDEM pretalx website.
• Indicate the duration in the title (20min, 10min or 5 min)
• Select ‘Bioinformatics and Computational Biology’ from the ‘Track’ field.

Note: Organizers may request shorter talk formats if we receive more submissions than we can accommodate.

If you cannot use Pretalx for any reason, contact us via the mailing list (https://framagroupes.org/sympa/info/bioinfo-fosdem) or in our Matrix space.

Join our community

• Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#fosdem-bioinfo:matrix.org
• Mailing list: https://framagroupes.org/sympa/info/bioinfo-fosdem

We look forward to your submissions and to seeing you at FOSDEM 2026!

The Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Devroom Team

• Alexis Praga - Medical Doctor, Ph.D in HPC
• Freek van Hemert - Next-Generation Sequencing & Data Infrastructure
• Jim Procter - Computational Scientist, FOSS Community
• Elena Grassi - Computational Biologist, Bioconductor/Bioconda contributor
• Alessandro Pilotti - Open Source Cloud Computing and Bioinformatics

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