School of Informatics

World software challenge award

Dr Giulio Caravagna and colleagues won Silver at the 10th Open Source Software (OSS) World Challenge.

Giulio Caravagna

The team from Edinburgh, New York, Stanford and Milan-Bicocca universities were awarded the prize for their TRONCO-PiCnIc software, which models how tumours originate and develop at the genome level.

Dr Caravagna says, "The hope is that by trying to capture possible regularities in the evolution of tumours in different patients, computers can help to make sense of the huge amount of genomic data produced by laboratories and so help to find better ways to treat individual cancers."

Dr Caravagna is a Research Associate in our Institute of Adaptive and Neural Computation, focusing on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

International competition

The international competition is hosted by Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning. It aims to promote open source software and exchange among  developers all over the world. International participants are allowed to submit any open source software developed within the past year. The criteria for judging includes broad applicability and potential impact, novelty, technical depth, demo suitability, and other factors (eg. maturity, popularity). Student-led efforts are particularly encouraged.

Useful links

OSS World Challenge

TRONCO PiCnIc

Institute of Adaptive and Neural Computation

Related media coverage

NPR article

NYU.edu coverage

Digital Trends article