On July 21, an exchange workshop was held between SZBL and Huawei at the Huawei Songshan Lake Campus. As part of the SZBL academic series, the workshop, called the SZBL Happy Hour, provides an occasion for young scientists and researchers who are working to advance science and technology to exchange. More than 20 SZBL delegates attending the event.

Yu Fan, Huawei’s technical expert, first made a report to update the progress of MindSpore, an all-scenario AI computing framework fully developed by Huawei, and MindSponge, a molecular simulation library as a cooperation between SZBL and Huawei based on the framework of MindSpore. Yu said that MindSponge has achieved multi-scale computing capacity, and can significantly reduce experimental time and cost. MindSponge will optimize protein structure prediction, molecular docking simulation and molecular simulation-based material life prediction for the next step.

Huawei technical experts Ma Zhiyong and Ning Weikang gave a joint report to feature on how the company leveraging its computing clusters in accelerating biomedical development.They also shared the application of the HPC platform, Kunpeng x86 gene sequencing platform and Peng Cheng Cloud Brain II in the field of biomedicine and discussed how cluster computing can contribute to biomedical R&D.

The keynote session of the workshop invited two SZBL scientists to share their research perspectives. Li Lei, a junior principal investigator at SZBL, talked aboutComputational Modeling of RNA-centric Regulation from Existing Sequencing Data. Under the bigger context of precision medicine, he illustrated on information extraction using biomedical big data and drew from the result of his research discovery, to emphasize the importance of incorporating big data technology with precision medicine.

Huang Kai, a junior principal investigator from SZBL, gave a report themed onPhase Separation: A New Paradigm In Biology. He introduced phase separation, a spotlight phenomenon for biological studies, and analyzed its impact on the current biosystems. As a higher-level structural system, phase separation can become the target of new drug R&D, and provide new research entry and paradigms for our scientists.

At the workshop, participants discussed in depth in a variety of topics, including drug molecular pre-training model, protein structure prediction, small molecule drug screening, algorithm development, data analysis accuracy, site processing and so forth.

This SZBL Happy Hour workshop was organized after the signing of a strategic cooperation agreement between SZBL and Huawei same day in the morning. The workshop served as a special event for free academic exchange between the two parties and strengthened partnership linkage for the future ahead.