Just before Christmas, the CSBD hosted a ten day de.NBI DAIS Hackathon on bioimage analysis. From 9th to 18th December, a total of 30 local and international developers from across communities met and discussed the latest trends in deep learning and image/data analysis. This year’s special focus was put on how to build bridges among the worlds of Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript. These are the most common programming languages used by many thousand researchers world-wide to build software tools for analyzing biomedical (image) data.

As usual, community building was an important goal of the Hackathon. “We know that new cool ideas often spark, when people meet in one place. Also, if you know your colleagues in person, it is typically much easier to collaborate even over large distances!”, says Tim-Oliver Buchholz, a PhD student in the Jug Lab at the CSBD and the MPI-CBG. A night out at Dresden’s famous Christmas market “Striezelmarkt” including some mulled wine added to bringing the international community of experts closer together, fostered exchange of ideas, and translated into standing collaboration across countries and communities.

Deborah Schmidt, a Research Software Engineer from the CSBD concluded: “It was, again, an incredible useful, exhausting, but at the same time fun event. I am already looking forward to the next Hackathon in 2020!”