- VanML 2024: Technique in Biostatistics and Epidemiology. February 2024. This year’s VanML was an online workshop for advanced computational and statistical techniques, emphasizing applications in genetics, public health, and modelling infectious disease. Participants attended synchronous talks, and worked on handouts at interactive sessions, and met the speakers in breakout rooms. Recordings and handouts are available here.
- VanML 2023: Social Determinants of Health. September 2023. This hackathon was held in person at the Harbour Centre in downtown Vancouver and was organized jointly with United Way British Columbia. Participants analyzed data consisting of anonymized calls made to the 211 British Columbia phone helpline service to 1) Predict the duration of calls made to 211 British Columbia, 2) Determine where additional food resources (such as food banks) are required in British Columbia, 3) Determine how the emergence of COVID-19 affected community needs.
- Statistical genetics and the host genetics of COVID-19. December 2021. A workshop on human genetic variation for COVID-19 severity, and susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection. This workshop was co-organized with Elika Garg, and held at the Computational and Methodological Statistics (CMStatistics) conference 2021 in King's College London, UK. Speakers included Dr. Lei Sun (University of Toronto), Dr. Brent Richards (McGill), Dr. Adam Auton (23andMe), and Andrea Ganna (University of Helsinki).
- VanML 2019: Genomics. December 2019. A conference bringing together top researchers in a range of biostatistical fields including population genetics, phylogenetics, pathogen studies and proteomics. The speakers and attendees included top researchers from the co-located NeurIPS, MLCB and WiML conferences. This conference was co-organized by the MAGPIE group and was funded by the Office of the Vice-President, Research at SFU, and the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at SFU, and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS), and the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute/Institut canadien des sciences statistiques (CANSSI).
- CANSSI National Case Study Competition 2019. October 2019. The CANSSI NCSC 2019 was a project for students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs at Canadian Universities. Students competed in a statistical prediction task. Carleton University, Concordia University, MacEwan University, Simon Fraser University and the University of New Brunswick hosted competitions with cash prizes to judge the solutions of their participating students. Winners of the regional competitions competed in a final national poster championship at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC at the CANSSI Headquarters. Students applied their knowledge to solve a real-world problem using a dataset about BC Ferries.