December 9, 2021

10:00am ET-1:00pm ET

to be held virtually/online

in conjunction with

(IEEE BIBM 2021)

Recent progress in high-throughput technology has generated vast amounts of data. Determining how to traverse the data-to-knowledge process from such massive raw data is a challenging issue in biomedical research. Consequently, developing reproducible, generalizable, and replicable advanced data analysis tools for bioinformatics and biomedical informatics research is an important area of work. Producing evidence of reproducibility, rigor, and consistency in bioinformatics research represents an important opportunity toward better understanding of the critical noise versus signal issue in bioinformatics models. In addition, it can be argued that the computational contributions in biomedical research have not reached the point of significantly impact healthcare and clinical practices. This can at least partially be attributed to the lack of higher degrees of robustness and reproducibility associated with research findings produced in the biomedical informatics domain. Our workshop aims to bring together researchers in biomedical data analysis, data science, bioinformatics, health informatics and clinical research to discuss the methods and impacts of producing reproducible informatics pipelines and analyses.

The target audience of the workshop is bioinformaticians, data analysts, data scientists, and computational health scientists who can collaborate together to improve and advocate for ide the reproducibility and robustness of current methods in data analytics for digital health and biological systems. We also hope to attract the attention of physicians and healthcare providers who are waiting patiently for decisive evidences to adopt results obtained from the Bioinformatics community. We maintain a RRoBIn mailing list of contacts who are interested in remaining informed on the activities of our group.

The objective of our workshop is to promote awareness of the need for reproducibility and rigor in biomedical informatics. The workshop will address these issues with a particular focus on the following objectives:

• Disseminate knowledge about the current state and best practices for disseminating biomedical informatics and bioinformatics research in a reproducible way.

• Promote the use of methods and standards for creating accessible and well-documented tools and analyses in application to biomedical research.

• Encourage the development of standards and expectations for reproducible biomedical research.

Potential topics for this workshop include:

• Bias in machine learning methods for data analysis in health data

• Anomaly detection in biological image processing

• Documentation of high-throughput assay preparation, execution, and analysis of results

• Methods for multiple-hypothesis testing

• Accuracy and sensitivity of Next Generation sequencing and assembly methods

• Algorithmic transparency and communication standards

• Network modeling – creation, thresholds, and filtering

• “Omics” methods for data aggregation

• Analysis of microbiomes data

• Biomedical data fusion

• Verification and validation methods for sorting biological noise from signal

• Trustworthiness of in silico methods without benchmarking studies

• Analysis or review of workflows, pipelines, and workbenches designed to optimize efficiency and reproducibility

Tentative Workshop Schedule - All times listed in Eastern Time (Tentative/Subject to change):

• • 10:00am Welcome and Introduction to the workshop

  • 10:15am Invited talk

  • 11:00am Coffee Break

  • 11:15am A Multi-Factorial Assessment of Functional Human Autistic Spectrum Brain Network Analysis

    • Oswaldo Artiles and Fahad Saeed

  • 11:45am A Reproducible ETL Approach for Window-based Prediction of Acute Kidney Injury in Critical Care Unit and Some Preliminary Results with Support Vector Machines

    • Isabela Chiorean, Beatrice Amico, Carlo Combi, and John Holmes

  • 12:15pm Confirmatory Factor Analysis on Mental Health Status using ABCD Cohort

    • Britny Farahdel, Bishal Thapaliya, Pranav Suresh, Bhaskar Ray, Vince Calhoun, and Jingyu Liu

  • 12:35pm Discussion

  • 1:00pm Closing Remarks

Important Dates:

• • SUBMISSION CLOSED: Workshop paper submission deadline.

  • Nov. 16, 2021: Decisions released to authors

  • Nov 21, 2021: Camera-ready version deadline

Submission Link and Instructions:

• We welcomes original submissions that have not been published and that are not under review. Accepted papers will be published in the IEEE BIBM conference proceedings and appear in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. [Click here to submit your paper: Paper Submission]

• Submitted manuscripts should not exceed 8 pages in IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines. (https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html). RROBIN 2021's technical program committee will review all submissions on the basis of their originality, technical soundness, significance, presentation, and relevance to the conference attendees.

Organizing Committee:

Hesham Ali, College of Information Science and Technology | University of Nebraska at Omaha | hali [at] unomaha [dot] edu

Sanjukta Bhowmick, College of Computer Science and Engineering | University of North Texas | Sanjukta.bhowmick [at] unt [dot] edu

Kate Cooper, College of Information Science and Technology | University of Nebraska at Omaha | kmcooper [at] unomaha [dot] edu

Kirk Gasper, College of Information Science and Technology | University of Nebraska at Omaha | kgasper [at] unomaha [dot] edu

Suyeon Kim, College of Information Science and Technology | University of Nebraska at Omaha | suyeonkim [at] unomaha [dot] edu