SDIWG:Ongoing Discussion 2011

Meeting notes for NIH Roadmap National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC) Centers to discuss plans for the last four years (2011-2015) of the NCBC effort

Link to NCBC Working Groups, and discussions with PIs in 2004-2005

Discussion Points: General

On behalf of the NCBC Project Team Peter Lyster is calling the PIs to discuss their thoughts on future joint activities of the NCBCs. After the output has been collected and published on the wiki the plan is to have a joint-PIs tcon with NIH staff to plan the next four years of joint activities.

• What are we going to do to plan a legacy so that program and the community can know the progress after 10 years, so that future leaders in government and research community plan future programs can plan and scientists can plan future efforts in computational science (BICB) at different scales from R01s up to Centers?

• Five years ago I had similar phone calls with PIs. Original minutes on discussion with PIs is on the NCBC wiki at http://na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/SDIWG:Software_and_Data_Integration_Working_Group_(SDIWG)_and_Centers_Discussion, more particularly http://na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/SDIWG:Ongoing_Discussion

• There are a number of thoughts on the table, e.g., joint outreach efforts of the investigator teams such as: session at significant meeting; contribution to a joint issue of BCR; a significant review paper; keep improving the outreach through the portal http://www.ncbcs.org/ … We want to hear from you.

• In addition, the Project team would like for ideas/input from PIs for the next AHM/NCBCmeeting

Tcon on February 2 with Kikinis NA-MIC team

Topic: Plans for joint activities among NCBCS for the next 4 years.

20110201: Tcon with NA-MIC Center

Attendees: Ron Kikinis, Will Schroeder, Zohara Cohen, Mike Ackerman, Peter Lyster (notes) Agenda: On behalf of the NCBC Project Team Peter Lyster is calling the PIs to discuss their thoughts on future joint activities of the NCBCs. After the output has been collected and published on the wiki the plan is to have a joint-PIs tcon with NIH staff to plan the next four years of joint activities. • What are we going to do to plan a legacy so that program and the community can know the progress after 10 years, so that future leaders in government and research community plan future programs can plan and scientists can plan future efforts in computational science (BICB) at different scales from R01s up to Centers? • Five years ago I had similar phone calls with PIs. Original minutes on discussion with PIs is on the NCBC wiki at http://na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/SDIWG:Software_and_Data_Integration_Working_Group_(SDIWG)_and_Centers_Discussion, more particularly http://na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/SDIWG:Ongoing_Discussion • There are a number of thoughts on the table, e.g., joint outreach efforts of the investigator teams such as: session at significant meeting; contribution to a joint issue of BCR; a significant review paper; keep improving the outreach through the portal http://www.ncbcs.org/ … We want to hear from you. • In addition, the Project team would like for ideas/input from PIs for the next AHM/NCBCmeeting

Minutes: Peter: Introduction: for the last five years we have run three-monthly tcon called “NCBC Working Groups” (was originally “Software and Data Integration Working Groups”). This is been successful in informal information exchange between Centers, initiating relationships that have often led to progress. Peter Suggests: Claim victory, dissolve old working groups; we can continue with the efforts, especially the portal (although need to get word out about that: is it linked to all PIs pages?). I suggest that in the next four years we address (i) outreach and (ii) impact. Zohara: What is status press release? Peter: Probably not from NIH. New Center had an announcement. Ron: Big P. Issue, we were selected to cover large area, and with very little overlap. NA-MIC has some obvious interactions with other Centers (Simbios/SimTK, i2b2,…). Peter: Original SDIWG/Working Groups had larger vision, but there was no reason to force interactions (e.g., standards for software engineering). Thus we did not do interoperability tests (which can be ‘toy problems’), but is there still room for this now that the Centers have matured? Zohara: interoperability isn’t between Centers. Need to get word out about all range of our activities. Peter: Possible article in BCR (Stanford Biomedical Computational Review http://biomedicalcomputationreview.org/, which is funded under Simbios). Russ Altman (PI Simbios) has indicated he is enthusiastic to take on a role here. Ron: Biositemaps is 50 foot view. But need 5000 foot view of Centers. Peter: Previous applications for funding haven’t done good job of convincing reviewers as a whole; it is difficult to write interesting by sufficiently detailed applications for funding in scientific computing. A related issue is then outreach, e.g., can we get the word out about accomplishments through editorials, command performances at large meetings, … how about a large review article spanning detailed content of Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology (BICB). The first cut of that is perhaps the article of Morris et al 2002 after the first BISTI symposium. [ref: Morris et al. “Digital Biology: an emerging and promising discipline”, Trends in Biotechnology, 23(3), 113-117 (2005).] Ron: Detail is in the content of the applications. Integrating the content into coherent picture is a lot of work and difficult. Peter: Approach at first is to have ‘volunteer’ e.g., to run tcons, the portal, run tcons to develop impact document. Under the current system of running tcons ever couple of months there is a sense that ‘Peter will handle things’. If we can parse out responsibility for organizing the efforts then there will be more shared responsibility. Ron: It depends on interest from NIH. Peter: the NIH is interested but the content is likely too much for Program Staff to gather, edit, coordinate on their own. Needs more ‘volunteer’ effort from NCBCs to step up to leadership, e.g., edit a joint review journal article. Ron: No program officer knows that content of all Centers, but then no PI does either. Peter: Yes, a volunteer would need to lead a collective effort. Zohara: Can we hire a contractor to help with, say, a large review article? Peter: Let’s talk with Karin. Peter: Also, don’t forget about nuts and bolts: how often tcon to share news of day. Appendix A: Original charter of SDI (software and data integration): Charter of SDI: The RFA states the goal of creating “the networked national effort to build the computational infrastructure for biomedical computing for the nation”. Here is a link to the wording in the original RFA-RM-04-002 [1]. In furthering this, the goals of the SDIWG in concert with the Project Team and Centers staff are: 1. To advance the domain sciences, and promote software interoperability and data exchange. 2. To capture the collective knowledge of software engineering and practices among the Centers and publish this knowledge widely.

Appendix: Original Working group had LSOs, Liaison from NCBC, Peter Lyster as Chair Software and Data Integration Working Group Peter Lyster (NIGMS, Chair) Stephan Bour (NIAID) Carol Bean (NCRR) Arthur Castle (NIDDK) German Cavelier (NIMH) Larry Clarke (NCI) Elaine Collier (NCRR) Peter Covitz (NCI) Jennifer Couch (NCI) Valentina Di Francesco (NIAID) Peter Good (NHGRI) John Haller (NIBIB) Donald Harrington (NIBIB) Peter Highnam (NCRR) Michael Huerta (NIMH) Jennie Larkin (NHLBI) Yuan Liu (NINDS) Michael Marron (NCRR) Richard Morris (NIAID) Bret Peterson (NCRR) Karen Skinner (NIDA) Michael Twery (NHLBI) Terry Yoo (NLM)