Schedule

Reading group meetings are held every two weeks. We have a speaker for every meeting. The speaker selects a paper and sends it to the group coordinator one week before the presentation. The coordinator shares the information with the group. Everyone is expected to read the paper carefully before the group meeting.

Each meeting lasts for 1 hour and consists of three parts:

• Paper presentation (20 minutes): The speaker presents the paper, including background, motivation, key challenges, methods and modeling assumptions, datasets, and experiments. The focus is on models, algorithms, and learning methods.
• Insights (5-10 minutes): The speaker shares their insights with the group. This includes insights related to the merits of the research, possible future directions, how can this research can be used in our ongoing projects, any drawbacks and ideas on how to fix them, any related-papers (other approaches to study the same problem), etc.
• Discussion (25-30 minutes): Q&A and broader debate, brainstorming what questions in biomedical data these methods can help us answer, availability of data and source code implementation, any other topic attendees want to talk about.

These are interactive events; questions and comments are welcome throughout the meeting!

Speakers

Every meeting has a dedicated speaker whose responsibility is to select a paper and present it. We use a rotation system for speakers. Members of the reading group can expect to speak 1-3 times a year.

Paper selection

Generally, papers presented at the reading group are published in top-tier venues (conferences and journals) in the last two years:

• Interdisciplinary journals:
  • Nature, Science, and Cell family, NEJM, PNAS, Lancet journals, JAMA journals
• Machine learning and data science:
  • Conferences: ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, ICDM, AAAI, IJCAI, UAI, FAT*, AISTATS, WSDM, SIGIR
  • Bioinformatics conferences: ISMB, RECOMB, PSB
  • Journals: TPAMI, JMLR, TKDD, TKDE, Bioinformatics, JAMIA, PLoS Computational Biology, BMC journals, ACS family

Please note this is only a sampling of relevant venues. We are generally interested in exciting, intriguing, and thought-provoking papers, no matter their publication venue, including preprints (e.g., arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv).

Time

Every other Thursday at 4:30-5:30pm.

Location

Virtual meetings on Zoom. We will resume in-person meetings as soon as we return to campus.

Coordinator

If you have any questions, email the reading group coordinator (Xiang Zhang, <xiang_zhang@hms.harvard.edu>). Suggestions are very much welcome!