Workshop experience in IIIT Delhi

IIIT DELHI

On March 26th, my senior Zeaan and I went for a workshop in IIIT Delhi (Indraprastha Institute of Technology, Delhi). It was my first time in IIIT Delhi and I was literally amazed by the ambience of it. Such a peaceful and wonderful atmosphere in the campus. Lush green and well maintained. The workshop was conducted in the R&D block. Before the talk began they provided us with a T-Shirt, ID Card and a notepad. The lecture hall was really amazing and well maintained. Overall the architecture is really amazing. The topic of the seminar was Algorithms That changed Molecular Biology(ATMB). It was a series of talk by 10 professors from various institutes in the field of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. The talk was primarily based on tools of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and how they can be applied to solve various problems in biological research. The talk was intellectually stimulating and was very interesting and fun. I am actually new to this field so since I am in an exploratory phase of my life, attending this workshop was a great decision. I got great insights about this new emerging field of science. There is a lot going on in this field of study that we are not aware of. I myself got surprised to see how diverse this field is.

The advent of machines and computational power had transformed the field of biology. We can now infer the data we collect from natural world using computation in short span of time with high precision. The talk was presented by a total of 10 professors most of them are from IIIT Delhi and few others are from IISc Bangalore, IIT Kanpur, GenetpretR and Genome Institute of Singapore. Various techniques in Bioinformatics was discussed in this workshop such as Multiple sequence alignment with Fast Fourier Transform(MAAFT), Gibbs Sampling, Hidden Markov Models, Protein structure prediction using MODELLER. All of these are new to me and I find these topics super amazing.

The session was highly interactive and students came from different universities and from different academic hierarchy and also few professors from other universities came to attend the session. The talk from Dr. DEBARKA SENGUPTA about Hidden Markov Models, Dr. CHIRAG JAIN about graph based representation of human genomes and Dr. ARJUN RAY about Protein tertiary structure prediction using MODELLER had particularly captivated my mind. I interacted with few PhD students in the field of Bioinformatics. I got a lot to learn from their academic journey. Also they arranged lunch for us and I have to say it was absolutely delicious. Overall, it was a great experience and is worth transferring this experience to my episodic memory.