STORIES FROM ERSILIA
Learn about our thoughts and experiences as we grow.
Translating learnings from Africa to LATAM
The 1st Latin American hands-on workshop on open source AI/ML guided drug discovery
The Ersilia Model Hub: using AI/ML models for drug discovery
We showcase the Ersilia Model Hub Python API for solubility prediction of organic compounds.
Building data science and AI skills for sustainable research development
Stakeholder needs assessment for the capacity building programs at Ersilia
Beyond the kingdom of the sick
This piece was published as part of the Mozilla Builders Zine
Community, Code, and Chemistry: The Open Science Behind 2024’s Nobel Prize
In this piece published in the Mozilla Blog, we explain why the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry is a triumph for open science
Implementing the FAIR4RS principles at Ersilia
We have participated in the FAIR-IMPACT project to help establish FAIR principles for software development
Data for Good: Spotlight on Our 2024 Hackathon with Ersilia
The Good Data Institute organized a hackathon to help Ersilia measure impact metrics and reflect them in a dashboard
How Ersilia distributes AI models to advance global health equity
Discover how the Ersilia Open Source Initiative accelerates drug discovery by using GitHub Actions to disseminate AI/ML models.
Landscapes of disease
We have used popular AI models to generate landscape images associated with infectious and neglected tropical disesease
Ersilia becomes a Digital Public Good
The Ersilia Model Hub has been recognised as a public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance
Providing data science support to important drug discovery studies— the largest chemoproteomics screen available to date
We have analysed the results of a proteome-wide ligand screening experiment carried out by Georg Winter’s lab at CeMM, Vienna
BrazMedChem: attending the largest medicinal chemistry conference in Latin America
Gemma was invited to give a lecture at the 2023 BrazMedChem conference in Salvador de Bahia
Ersilia: AI as a tool for drug discovery in Africa
The SSI Fellowship supported the open access publication of our work with H3D
Pipeline Dreams: SMILES All Around as MLOps Boosts Drug Discovery
The Good Data Institute wrote this piece on the model inference pipeline they built for Ersilia
Four success stories of skills-based volunteering at Ersilia
We have found that skill-based volunteering is an effective strategy for enabling open source contributions in biomedical research from software developers who, despite not specialising in this field, are keen to participate
Invisible cities so far
2023 marks the centenary of Italo Calvino. Our organisation, Ersilia, is named after a city imagined in his book Invisible Cities
From machine learning to biomedicine: a journey in code
Our Trustee Alacia Armstrong interviews Ankur Kumar
Tech for social good – how Ersilia taps into open science AI models to tackle infectious diseases
The UK tech publisher Diginomica interviewed Ersilia’s co-founders
Creating equitable global health: global impact partnering with Splunk
Ersilia and Splunk have joined efforts to create scale up the Ersilia Model Hub
WCAIR’s drug discovery beginner’s guide for the Ersilia community
WCAIR, a leading center for anti-infective drug discovery, offered a one-month introductory course for data scientists and software engineers
Towards AI model deployment with the support of Digital Ocean
In this customer story, Digital Ocean explains how they have helped Ersilia through the DO Ambassadors Program
Colonial medicine and global health
In a series of articles, Rosauro Varo Cobos offers his perspective on racism, colonialism and global health
Skills-Based Volunteering case study – How GitHub Actions help Ersilia
Cynthia Lo (GitHub) reports how a team of GitHub volunteers has supported Ersilia to scale-up model incorporation workflows
Scientific authorship and creativity in the age of AI
AI-powered creativity may reshape how scientists approach their work and think about themselves. Visual arts and creative writing provide early examples.
Diagrammatic view of drug response variability in Africa
We have kick-started a project with H3D to identify genetic traits specific to African populations that determine variability in malaria and tuberculosis treatment
Witnessing the launch of the Center for Drug Discovery at the University of Buea, Cameroon
Ersilia has offered training in AI and participated in the foundational workshop of the recently inaugurated Center for Drug Discovery, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The new and the old
Ersilia is joining the Barcelona Health Hub, a digital health center located in the architectural ensemble of Hospital de Sant Pau
Global Health prompts to an Artificial Intelligence language model
We have interacted with Bloom, an open source AI tool trained on a gigantic corpus of text, in search of insights into Global Health and our role as a non-profit organization
From the lab bench to an SSI fellowship
A short story about Ersilia’s co-founder journey from experimental sciences to computational biology, with the support from the Software Sustainability Institute.
Privacy-preserving AI for drug discovery
We present ChemXOR, a software tool to build privacy-preserving AI models for drug discovery
Losing, gaining countries
We recently visited the University of Buea, Cameroon, as part of a project to discover novel antivirals based on natural product compounds
Three dilemmas and how Fast Forward helped
We explain how the Fast Forward Accelerator has helped us identify the best funding strategy for Ersilia.
Portable science
I often go back to Enrique Vila-Mata’s 1985 short novel Brief history of portable literature. I like all Vila-Matas, but this is one of my favourites, although probably not his best. I enjoy its blend of absurdity and erudition, I suppose.
Knowledge as a list of numbers
If there is one thing I’ve been obsessed about as a researcher, this would be knowledge representation, or the art of converting the information we have about the real world into something a computer can manage (and even “understand”).
The hand of Aris Kindt
Here some personal thoughts on the distance between the data scientist and the patient in biomedical research, based on an apparent mistake in Rembrandt’s famous autopsy painting
Downloading PubChem Bioassays made easy
A simple script to download bioactivity data for small molecules
But is it science?
Thoughts about research parasitism and secondary data analysis
An insight into the journey with the Coaching Fellowship
A personal share from Gemma’s transition to becoming the CEO of Ersilia
Open Collective is Redefining Open Organizations
An example of the benefits of being an Open Collective for a charitable organisation like Ersilia.
Learnings from a software sustainability health check
We underwent the online evaluation offered by the Software Sustainability Institute
Beyond the hype of AI/ML in biomedicine
What are the real capabilities of AI/ML and what is needed to efficiently incorporate it into day-to-day scientific research?
Pro-bono support from the Cranfield Trust
If you are a charity leader and feel that professional business consultancy and mentoring can bring your charity to the next level, do not miss this post!
Thank you to the FundOSS team
We want to thank FundOSS for including the Ersilia Open Source Initiative in the pilot round of democratic funding for Open Source Software, as well as our 104 backers, who have helped us raise $13,752
Ersilia Open Source Initiative Brand guidelines
Here we present our brand guidelines, including logo, fonts and color palettes
Uncreative science
Some personal thoughts before populating the Ersilia Model Hub
Open source drug discovery for novel antimalarials
Ersilia participates in the Open Source Malaria project
Outstanding performance in a community challenge
Chemical Checker results in a DREAM Challenge
Our small charity explained to digital nomads
We stayed at Cloud Citadel coliving space
How to harness the power of digital technologies for non-profits
An applied example: Ersilia Open Source Initiative