Zurich, Switzerland and Konstanz, Germany - We are happy to announce an academic partnership with the Data Handling Unit of High Content Screening Facility - RISC at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Content of this partnership is a close collaboration on the KNIME-based High Content Screening Platform HC/DC.

HC/DC has been developed by the Data Handling Unit of High Content Screening Facility – RISC, at the ETH Zurich.

High Content Screening (HCS) is increasingly used for the automated evaluation of spatio-temporally resolved multiple biochemical and morphological parameters in cellular systems. HCS data include comprehensive information about the bioactive molecules, the targeted genes, and images as well as their extracted data matrices after acquisition. The architecture of HC/DC is based on the KNIME platform and the Eclipse plug-in framework. HC/DC is a functional set of nodes for HCS, working together with KNIME and imageJ.

A plug-in for opening and processing proprietary HCS files (library management, numeric results and images) was developed within the KNIME environment. All those open source components (Eclipse environment, KNIME, R-Project, Weka and ImageJ) were chosen for its platform-independence, openness, simplicity, and portability. They are also the fastest pure Java image-, data-processing programs currently available.

The doors are open to our laboratories for you to check out our new features! These are features that have not yet been evaluated by long-term testing, as for core KNIME features, but are still stable enough to give you an idea of what future KNIME functionality is going to be like.

Feel free to test it, but remember that you are dealing with experimental stuff! Feedback from you would be great, as we want to use it to improve features and add the functionality you need to get to grips with your real-world applications. This feedback might be in the form of:

• bug reports
• feature requests
• example workflows
• documentation
• code contributions

The first feature hot from the labs is the text processing feature: a mixture of natural language processing, text mining, and information retrieval. You can find it under:

http://labs.knime.org/textprocessing

We look forward to hearing from you! And be sure to register to the blog's RSS feed in order to be informed about irregular software updates of the listed projects.

P.S. You can use your KNIME.org account for the labs section as well.

The first North American workshop is now over and proved to be an inspiring and successful event in San Francisco. One important factor for the success of the workshop was the location at swissnex. We would like to thank the people at swissnex for their uncomplicated help and infinite patience!

The one-and-a-half day user session was used to introduce the new features of KNIME 2.0. This was followed by an intense two-and-a-half day developer session. The Life Science day concluded the workshop, where our partners and supports presented life science-related extensions.

Upcoming:

Next Developer Workshop

...will be in roughly one year in Zurich, Switzerland.

Next User Workshop

...will be in fall 2009 in Vicenza, Italy, with a strong focus on Life Science applications and Schroedinger nodes. It will be held together with Soluzione Informatiche. For more information see KNIME Life Science User Training.

San Francisco, USA - February 2-6, 2009

We are happy to announce the first North American KNIME Workshop to be held in beautiful San Francisco from February 2 - 6, 2009. Similar to 2007's workshop in Konstanz, Germany, it will include extensive hands-on sessions for users and developers presented by the people behind KNIME. The developer part will give users detailed insight into the steps of developing full-featured nodes and other extensions for the KNIME platform and together with the user sessions, will focus especially on the many new features of the KNIME 2.0 release. More information can be found in the workshop program.
We are looking forward to meeting you in the Bay Area next February.