ZIH-Colloquium
Table of contents
The ZIH colloquium is a public event and takes place usually the 4th Thursday of each month. Below you will find the current and former dates with all necessary information. You are cordially invited!
New Colloquia
05th May 2022, 15:00 MESZ, ONLINE-Lecture (additional date):
Oliver Knodel (Data Management and HPC, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf) - "HELIPORT - An Integrated Research Data Lifecycle" (slides)

Oliver Knodel
The guidance system HELIPORT aims to make the components or steps of the entire life cycle of a research project at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) discoverable, accessible, interoperable and reusable according to the FAIR principles. In particular, this data management solution deals with the entire lifecycle of research experiments, starting with the generation of the first digital objects, the workflows carried out and the actual publication of research results. For this purpose, a concept was developed that identifies the different systems involved and their connections. By integrating computational workflows (CWL and others), HELIPORT can automate calculations that work with metadata from different internal systems (application management, Labbook, GitLab, and further). In this lecture, the overall system will be presented using a practical example.
Oliver Knodel received a Diploma in Computer Science in 2011 and a Dr.-Ing. in Computer Engineering at the Technische Universität Dresden in 2018. Since the end of 2018, he has been a post-doc at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, a member of the EU project ExPaNDS and the Mu2e Collaboration at Fermilab, Chicago. Since 2022, Oliver Knodel is group leader of the group Data Management and HPC at the HZDR. His main interests are data management, metadata catalogues and reconfigurable computing.
Participants with ZIH login can reach the room via the following link: Online-Colloquium
Participants without university login can reach the room via the following link: Online-Colloquium
Past Colloquia 2022
28th April 2022, 15:00 MESZ, ONLINE-Lecture:
Martin Potthast (Institute for Informatics, University of Leipzig) - "Web Archive Analytics"

Martin Potthast
The talk recaps how the Web has been systematically archived since around the turn of the millenium, and how popular resources are being exploited at ever increasing scales until today. Besides commercial players such as Google or Microsoft, whose search engines and many other products depend on Web archives maintained in-house, many non-profit organizations are archiving the Web as well. Chief among them is the Internet Archive, which was founded around 1996, alongside Google, and which has meanwhile grown into a fully-fledged digital library with the goal of providing "universal access to all knowledge". In collaboration with the Internet Archive, the partners Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Leipzig University and Martin-Luther-Universtät Halle have downloaded a substantial part of the the Internet Archive's Web archive, which forms the basis for many joint research projects with applications in information retrieval and natural language processing.
Martin Potthast is head of the Text Mining and Retrieval Group at Leipzig University. His research focuses on information processing, the challenges arising from assessing the credibility and originality of information obtained online, and the development of information systems. Martin Potthast has contributed to the fields of information retrieval, natural language processing, and data science. Several of his achievements have been awarded with scientific prizes.
07th April 2022, 15:00 MESZ, ONLINE-Lecture:
Alexander Fletcher (School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Sheffield, UK) -
"Chaste: Developing sustainable software for computational biology" (slides)

Alexander Fletcher
Gaining a full understanding of complex living systems is essential to tackling some of the most pressing research questions of the 21st Century, from the processes of early development of an organism to the effects of ageing. This system-level behaviour arises from complex interactions between component processes at many levels of biological organisation. For example, the development of a complex functional multicellular organism from a single cell involves tightly regulated and coordinated cell behaviours coupled through short- and long-range biochemical and mechanical signals. To truly comprehend this complexity, alongside experimental approaches we need computational models, which can link observations to mechanisms in a quantitative, predictive, and experimentally verifiable way. To this end we are developing Chaste (https://github.com/chaste), an open-source C++ library for multiscale modelling of biological tissues and cell populations. In this talk I will discuss how Chaste has been used to gain insight into a variety of biological processes. I will also highlight some of our ongoing and future work to improve the reproducibility and re-use of such models.
Dr. Alexander Fletcher is a Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, and a group leader at the Bateson Centre, at the University of Sheffield. He previously pursued doctoral and postdoctoral research at the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford. His group develops and applies a range of mathematical and computational modelling approaches to understand the formation, dynamics, and evolution of multicellular tissues. Recent applications include the patterning and morphogenesis of epithelial tissues. To support this work, he is a founding developer of Chaste, the first open-source simulation package for off-lattice and multiscale models of cell populations.
31st March 2022, 15:00 MESZ, ONLINE-Lecture:
Peter Hinow (Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Wisconsin, USA) -
"Tiny Giants - Mathematics Looks at Zooplankton" (slides) (movie)

Peter Hinow
Zooplankton is an immensely diverse group of organisms occupying every corner of the oceans, seas, and freshwater bodies on earth. They form a crucial link between autotrophic phytoplankton and higher trophic levels such as crustaceans, mollusks, fish, and marine mammals. Changing water temperatures, salinities and decreasing pH values currently create monumental challenges to their well-being. A significant subgroup of zooplankton are crustaceans of sizes between 1 and 10 mm. They have extremely acute senses that allow them to navigate their surroundings, escape predators, find food and mate. In a series of works with Rudi Strickler (Department of Biological Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee) he has investigated various behaviors of crustacean zooplankton. These include the visualization of the feeding current of the calanoid copepod Leptodiaptomus sicilis and the communication by sex pheromones in the copepod Temora longicornis. In these studies, tools from optics, ecology, computational fluid dynamics, and computational neuroscience are used.
Peter Hinow received a Diplom-Mathematiker from the Technische Universität Dresden and a PhD in Mathematics from the Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee in 2007. This was followed by a postdoc at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) at the University of Minnesota. Since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. His primary interests are mathematical modeling of drug delivery to the brain using ultrasound-sensitive liposomes and the behavioral ecology of zooplankton.
History: ZIH-Colloquia of the Past Years
History 2021
History 2019/2020
History 2018
History 2017
History 2016
History 2014/2015
History 2013
History 2012
History 2011
History 2010
History 2009
History 2008
History 1998 - 2007