BroadHacks

🎉 Thank you hackers for participating in BroadHacks 2024! 🎉

Congrats to our winners!

• BroadHacks 2024 Feature Challenge: Team 14 - BroadHive

• BroadHacks 2024 Judge's Choice Award: Team 3 - Targeted Correction of Missense Mutations through Non-Genetic Protein Scaffolding

• BroadHacks 2024 Broadie's Choice Award: Team 13 - Broad Atlas

See all BroadHacks 2024 Project Submissions here!

See photos here!

Thank you to the Incredible Broadies who made BroadHacks possible

***Live Hackathon Schedule***

Thursday June 27

• 2p: Opening remarks and Hacking official starts

• 5-6p: Dinner (Pizza and Cup Ramen Bar!)

• 9p: Midnight snacks (Ice Cream! and additional fruits, crackers, and dip)

Firday June 28

• 9-10a: Breakfast (Bagels, cream cheese, lunch meats and lox, yogurt, fruits)

• 12-1p: Lunch (Wraps, Cobb Salad, cheese and meat trays)

• 2-3p: Hacking ends, expo and judging starts

• 3-3:30p: Closing remarks and awards

See more details below about judging and awards!

About

Broadies are eager innovators, learners, and collaborators. We have many original and potentially transformative ideas in bioinformatics, computational biology, and software engineering. However, our schedules are busy, and we find ourselves constrained by time and resources. BroadHacks aims to provide Broadies a unique opportunity to dive into our untapped ideas, explore new skills, and foster institute-wide collaborations with a 24-hour hackathon event. 

BroadHacks also features events and resources prior to the hackathon open to ALL Broadies to build computational skills and facilitate institute-wide discussions on opportunities and solutions in computational research at the Broad:

• Workshop Series (1.5-4 hour workshops over June 17 - June 24): 5 workshops spanning intro to UNIX to analyzing imaging data! 

• BroadHacks Ideathon (June 11, 4-6pm): We want to hear about your pet project or idea! Come share and listen to speed talks and "pitches" about ideas and problems across the Broad and initiate action!

Why Attend?

Opportunities include, but are not limited to:

• Meet and collaborate with Broadies from different labs and programs

• Explore different fields of research, available resources, and datasets at the Broad

• Learn and develop skills in computation and software

• Create unique computational solutions to investigate biological questions 

"24 hour" Hackathon Event

Thursday June 27 - Friday June 28, 2024.

75 Ames/415 Main 2nd floor connector.

Participants and mentors

• Anyone with a Broad affiliation and badge access.

• Anyone with expertise or want to learn computational biology, bioinformatics, and software engineering or expertise are welcome!

Projects

Anything in the realm of computational biology, bioinformatics, and software engineering! Consider this as an opportunity to level up your computational skills, learn about a different domain, work on something you have not had the time to yet, and connect with different Broadies. We will provide events to facilitate team building and honing in on particular goal or project.

Awards

We want to recognize the ideas and ingenuity that the hackers bring to the event and the computational research ecosystem at the Broad. We will have the following awards:

• BroadHacks 2024 Feature Challenge: Broad platforms and groups have produced unique and valuable datasets that will catalyze scientific discovery. We challenge hackers to innovate ways to integrate multiple datasets together in unique and creative ways to drive biological discoveries or enhance infrastructure and standards to perform cross-modality research. See Data Integration Brainstorming Event section below for information!

• BroadHacks 2024 Best Overall Project: We want to see what problems or ideas matter to you, and the innovative ways you tackle them!

• People's Choice award: All Broadies are invited to the expo to see what Broadhacks teams have worked on and vote on their favorite project!

Additional eligibility for awards include: 

• Teams must have between 2-4 hackers (inclusive). All participating team members must be a Broad affiliate.

• The team must submit their Expo Presentation (guide-template available here) to our website (submission form here)

• At least one team member must be present in person to present the project at the expo.

Note that teams may include remote Broadies, and that work on the submitted project may begin anytime prior to the official "24 hour" hackathon event. So if you already have a team or already made progress on an idea before June 27, your project is still eligible for awards!

Judging Criteria

The BroadHacks 2024 Feature Challenge and  Best Overall Project will be judged based on three equally weighted criteria:

• Motivation and Objective: Can the team explain with clarity the relevance or potential impact of their idea, and what they aimed to achieve during the hackathon?

• Technical Execution: How did the team work towards their objective? What technologies or tools did they use? Were they resourceful and/or creative?

• Results and outcomes: What was the outcome of their work? Does the project provide value (i.e. a working product, proof of concept, insight that informs future research directions, etc.) towards the research ecosystem at the Broad?

See the Judging Criteria Matrix for more details.

Looking for inspiration or help with your project ideas?  We have organized workshops, talks, and ideation events to help you learn new skills, get familiar with available data sets and resources, find a team, and explore exciting ideas.

Broadhacks Ideathon Tuesday June 11 (ft. RATalks)

Time: Tuesday June 11, 4-6pm

Location: Serengeti (6th Floor between 415M and 75A)

This is an event open to all Broadies to share ideas and problems relating to or could benefit from computational biology, bioinformatics, and software engineering. The event features speed-talks or "pitches" and an open mic session for anyone to step up and pitch, followed by time to mingle and discuss ideas and problems.

• Part 1: Pre-scheduled speakers (5 minutes, 2-3 slides optional)

• Part 2: Open mic; anyone can come up to the podium and talk about a problem! (max 2 minutes)

• Part 3: Mingle with speakers and other audience members and hackathon participants

Why participate or attend?

• If you are participating in the Hackathon event, this is a great opportunity to find your team, pitch an idea you already have, and brainstorm a hackathon project!

• If you have ideas you would like Broadies participating in the hackathon to work on, this is also a great time to share, inspire, and collaborate!

Sign up to speak!

• If you are interested in pitching an idea or problem worth solving, please sign up here!  https://forms.gle/9Zg7q1CHvBCACEFs7.  Thank you to all attendees for a wonderful Ideathon! We heard some great ideas about LLM based tools, new visualizations, and extracting features from diverse datasets!

• This form will also be open during the open-mic session during the event itself. All speakers who sign-up will be entered for a raffle prize!

Data Integration Brainstorming Event Monday June 24, 11am-1pm

RSVP here so we can order food! https://forms.gle/b3ECpDkHnmcgfeKR9 

Brainstorm hackathon ideas to tackle the unique challenges and opportunities in integrating datasets, featuring leaders across Broad’s platforms and programs!

• Noam Shoresh: Associate director of the Epigenomics Program

• Jonathan Livny: Co-director of the Microbial Omics Core in the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program and Head of the Technology Core of the Broad’s Genome Center for Infectious Diseases

• Alán Fernando Muñoz González: Post-doc in the Carpenter-Singh Lab and Imaging Platform

The Big Idea: We could gain potential biological insights from querying across datasets with shared axes, such as compound screening, perturbations and gene knockouts, epigenomic characterization, shared cell or tissue of orgin, etc. Performing such multi-dataset analyses is challenging due to the need for deep expertise in the data source and metadata. We encourage hackers to think about exciting ways to combine multiple datasets to discover (1) novel relationships between datasets and datatypes that inform our understanding of biology, and (2) tackle challenges in performing these integrations.

Some example axes:

• Identify compounds that similarly impact host and pathogen with compound screening data across cell lines, TB, and imaging data

Some big ideas on how to stream line data integration:

• Using LLMs to query across datasets with standard structure

• Accessibility and standardized infrastructure/systemic organization

Attend this event to help learn more about the datasets at the Broad and brainstorm the first steps to take during the hackathon to approach these ideas!

Have questions or want to support the event?

Please reach out to the CodeRATS chairs if you have questions about participating or supporting the event!

• Claudia Chu (cchu@broadinstitute.org)

• Jordan Safer (jsafer@broadinstitute.org)

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is a hackathon? What will participants be working on?

Hackathons are opportunities for participants to learn,and/or collaborate on projects/ideas they want to explore that are either 

1.  completely out of their domain, or 

2.  solve a particular problem/idea they have already been thinking about but haven't had the time set aside to address it. 

We do not specify exactly what participants will work on besides being loosely in the realm of bioinformatics, computational biology, and software engineering. However, we are organizing talks, workshops, and team building events prior to the event to help participants identify ideas or problems that are interesting to them and form teams (2-4 people). We are also reaching out to different platforms across the Broad to propose or incentivize participants to work on projects using their datasets or products. More details will be available in April, and any suggestions or if you have suggestions on projects to work  on, please let us know in the registration form or by contacting one of the team members via email or slack!

Q: Is this event restricted to CAs and ACBs?

A: Not at all! The hackathon is for the Broad community, and is open to all with a Broad badge.

Q: I don't have prior experience programming, will I be able to participate?

There's no doubt that many hackathon projects will have a heavy coding component, however, every team will benefit from a collaboration between biologists and computationalists! During team matching, we will work to bring computational-minded and biology-minded folk together :) 

• There are many ways to get involved with BroadHacks

• Attend workshops and talks

• Pitch ideas and recruit CAs/software engineers to help

• Learn new computational skills!

Q: Do I need to pay for this event?

This event is free for Broadies to participate in! Food will be provided.

Q: I am not sure I will get permission from my manager or supervisor to participate in the full event. Can I partially participate? 

Ideally participants will be able to attend the full hackathon. If you plan to attend, we highly advise that you notify your supervisor or team as soon as possible to make appropriate arrangements. That said, we are working with Broad leadership so everyone will be allowed and encouraged to fully participate.

If you are interested in participating in this event, please fill out the registration form so we can take this information to Broad leadership!

Q: Do I need to take time off work to participate?

As an official Broad event, participating in this hackathon should NOT require you to take any vacation or PTO time. This is a great opportunity for you to level-up your skills, make connections, and explore new ideas in research. We highly encourage you to let your team know in advance that you plan to fully participate so you can plan accordingly. If you have concerns, please reach out or let us know when you register so we can coordinate.