About

The purpose of this page is to disseminate materials presented at the Day Zero of the Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC) Spring 2016 Symposium, as part of the National Cancer Institute Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) workshop “The Role of Academic Technology Development in Cancer Research”. The workshop took place on March 13, 2016 in Napa, California.

The goal of the workshop was to discuss the role of academic informatics technology in cancer research, with an emphasis on technology developed through the Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR). ITCR is a relatively young program at NCI that aims to sustainably support development, maintenance and dissemination of investigator-initiated, research-driven informatics technology. As part of NCI, ITCR is interested in integration of informatics technology development with hypothesis-driven cancer research and translational/clinical investigations. ITCR promotes public-private partnership in technology development and distribution. Both commercial and academic technology play an important role in biomedical research, including clinical research. In this workshop we aimed provide a discussion forum to better understand the approaches, strengths, and limitations of academic technology development processes as well as the interfaces between the commercial and academic technology development communities.

The workshop was co-chaired by Mary Goldman, UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, and Andrey Fedorov, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

We thank all the speakers for their willingness to share their ideas, and for their openness in making the slides presented at the workshop publicly available.

Program

Crowd-sourced minutes from the workshop are available in this Google Doc.

Session 1: Developer Perspective

This session featured talks from established academic software tools that have a long history of development and a broad user base, followed by a panel discussion. The idea was to represent tools from various domains and discuss how the development of the tool is sustained, how the user community is supported, was open source adopted and and if so, why, how quality of the code is maintained (who is doing the coding), how the developing group is envisioning the software usage, etc.

Session 2: Stakeholders Perspective

In this session talks from the spectrum of academic software stakeholders were presented, followed by a panel discussion. Each speaker was asked to present the vision for the role of academic software in the domain of their work, challenges specific to the use of academic software, what is working well, what needs to be improved, words of advice to the academic software developers, etc.

Session 3: Users Perspective

This session contained talks from the groups using academic software and unaffiliated with the code group developing the software tool. Such groups may include academic researchers, industry, clinical researchers, etc.