Project News

Final project report submitted & 4th periodic review concluded

The 4th and final project report (121 pages technical report and financial statements of all partners) was submitted on 29 February 2024 for evaluation by the European Commission (EC) and the 4th periodic review meeting by independent experts (selected by the EC) concluded on 07 March 2024. All deliverables have been submitted to the EC and our main product, the  FeatureCloud App Store – an elegant open-access solution for federated machine learning in biomedical research – is up and running (press release)!

Interested website visitors can access FeatureCloud’s scientific publications, the public deliverable reports of the project, info materials on the “Downloads” page, and read a brief public summary of the final reporting period 4 (RP4) – spanning from 01 July 2022 to 31 December 2023. The consortium members are excited about the successful completion of the project and cordially thank the members of the scientific advisory board (SAB), the independent expert reviewers, keynote lecturers and collaborators, and the EC project officers for continued support, guidance, and encouragement. We are especially grateful to Dr. Fejér Szilárd and colleagues from the Pro-Vitam and Pro-Medical research hospitals in Sfântu Gheorghe and Cluj-Napoca, Romania, for testing and validating the FeatureCloud platform and its apps in clinical practice, which helped the consortium to fulfill the requirements of Work Package 8 (WP8).

The 5-year-long FeatureCloud project ended in December 2023 and received funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 826078.

Record attendance at the Final General Assembly in Lisbon!

With a record number of 46 attendees, the 6th General Assembly (GA) and 11th Steering Committee (SC) Meeting in sunny Lisbon, Portugal, from 12-15 November 2023 was a whopping success and a wonderful final face-to-face meeting of the entire consortium and our valued scientific advisory board (SAB) members. Capturing the collaborative and cheerful FeatureCloud spirit, the group picture below shows the proud feeling everyone carried back home based on our achievements and inspirational discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, including the FeatureCloud platform’s sustainability and future use cases in clinical practice, following the keynote lectures by two local FeatureCloud stakeholders, namely David Belo (Safe AI [4U], Lisbon, Portugal) and Nuno da Silva (Hospital Da Luz, Lisbon, Portugal).

Video of FeatureCloud Retreat in Romania – Impressions and Statements

From 11-14 June 2023, the FeatureCloud core team was welcomed by free-roaming bears as we assembled for a retreat in the wilderness of the Carpathian Mountains. Watch the summary video of the 10th Steering Committee (SC) Meeting at Balvanyos Resort, Romania, including interviews with work package (WP) leaders, presentations about the FeatureCloud App Store, and visits at the office of consortium member Egnosis (GND) and at the clinical laboratory of our main collaborator Pro-Vitam, both located in nearby Sfântu Gheorghe.

Spread the word about the FeatureCloud App Store

It’s here: https://featurecloud.ai
The FeatureCloud App Store is ready for the world. It’s an all-in-one, cost-free solution for privacy-preserving international collaborations amongst clinicians, biomedical researchers, and external developers. Federated, private, secure. Everyone can open an account, create a project, or add their own app. The FeatureCloud team certifies the quality and security requirements for new apps. Look out for and use our hashtags: #FeatureCloud and #AppStoreHealthcare!

New press release

Friends and fans of FeatureCloud: Please share our press release (EN / DE)! The FeatureCloud App Store is ready for the world – a privacy-preserving, federated solution for biomedical researchers, clinicians, app developers, and big data analysts alike. It’s an App Store for secure scientific collaboration in the healthcare sector that does not require sharing or uploading any primary medical data to a centralised cloud. Only outcome model parameters or machine learning models are shared. Explore the platform, set up an account, create projects (or add your own app), and start collaborating internationally!

Retreat in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania for 10th SC Meeting, hosted by partner GND

It was a different, inspirational, fun, and very productive 10th Steering Committee (SC) Meeting in the midst of the Carpathian Mountains of Romania – thanks to the boundless hospitality of our local host Egnosis (powerd by project partner Gnome Design, GND) and our clinical WP8 collaborator Dr. Szilárd Fejér at Pro-Vitam, both located in Sfântu Gheorghe (#sepsi). A sporty outdoor workshop – prior to two traditional meeting days – gave everyone a fresh mind and lots of energy for our upcoming deliverables, while wild brown bears roamed around freely and entirely unimpressed by science and the advances of artificial intelligence (AI). Everyone got back home safely with unforgettable memories and new ideas for future projects and collaborations!

New faces at the 5th GA Meeting in Hamburg

At FeatureCloud’s 5th General Assembly (GA) Meeting in the city of the coordinating University of Hamburg (UHAM) from 15th – 17th March, a couple of new, energetic young faces joined the consortium. We welcomed three new student members from Syddansk Universitet (SDU), a new student from the Philipps-University Marburg (UMR), and we were introduced to the entire FeatureCloud team from Prof. Jan Baumbach’s “CosyBio” group at UHAM. Memorable highlights were the keynote lecture by VIP guest Dr. Szilárd Fejér from work package 8 (WP8) collaborator Pro-Vitam in Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania, and the self-paid Lasertag social activity. We also got updated on the great progress made in all work packages (WPs), discussed how to address EC reviewers’ comments in the last project year, and decided on internal reviewers to ensure high quality of all remaining deliverables.

8th SC Meeting in Germany’s capital, Berlin

Blessed with sunshine and brainy scientists, FeatureCloud’s 8th Steering Committee (SC) Meeting in Berlin, Germany, from 2nd to 4th November 2022 was a fruitful gathering with lots of scientific discussions, important decisions on upcoming consortium meetings, and a very informative and inspiring keynote lecture by IT expert Daniel Weiss from the Dr. von Haunerschen Kinderspital in Munich, Germany.

REPORTING OF 3RD RESEARCH PERIOD SUBMITTED TO EU

Click here to read the Publishable Summary of the 3rd Research Period (1st July 2021 – 30th June 2022).

Postdoc Position in Richie’s group – Federated Machine Learning for Complex Multi-OMICS Data

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) for the Computational Biology laboratory chaired by Associate Prof. Richard Röttger invites applications for a postdoctoral position within the FeatureCloud project (focus: federated machine learning and AI) to be filled by 1 September 2022 or soon thereafter for a period of initially 15 months with the prospects of being prolonged. Application deadline: 1 August 2022.

Welcome to the 4th General Assembly in Hamburg

Welcome to Hamburg, dear FeatureCloud colleagues and members of our Scientific Advisory Board! So nice to have this 4th General Assembly (GA) Meeting face-to-face again. Have a wonderful time and savour the science!

1st FeatureCloud Hackathon completed

It’s a wrap: The 1st International FeatureCloud Hackathon finished successfully  – Thanks for the great attendance! Six teams worked on privacy-preserving solutions for analyzing microbiome and medical imaging data.

Apply now to the 1st International FeatureCloud Hackathon

https://featurecloud.ai/hackathon-2022
Apply now – the deadline to submit your application for a travel scholarship to attend the FeatureCloud Hackathon about privacy-preserving AI is this Friday, 29 April (5 pm CEST)! Come to Hamburg from 20-24 June 2022 for this unique event, hosted by Prof. Dr. Jan Baumbach (https://www.cosy.bio/).

“Tech Lunch Talk” by Prof. Dr. Jan Baumbach this Friday, 17th Dec. 1–2 pm CET

Tune in online this Friday, 17th December 2021, 1–2 pm CET: In this “Tech Lunch Talk”, Prof. Dr. Jan Baumbach from the University of Hamburg (UHH) will cover the idea of systems medicine, what artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have to do with it, why privacy matters, and how the Institute for Computational Systems Biology (CosyBio) at the University of Hamburg overcomes the privacy barrier with e.g. federated learning (FL).

6th SC Meeting in Vienna – Finally catching up f2f again!

Thanks to everyone being vaccinated, we held our 6th SC Meeting in person in beautiful Vienna, including vibrant discussions on how to optimize our App Store for healthcare, while the youngsters made sure it will be “bullet-proof” (hackathon). Great thing, too, that Rudolf Mayer from SBA Research, hosting us at the SBA offices, dressed up in FeatureCloud colors!

Reporting of 2nd research period submitted to EU

Click here to read the Publishable Summary of the 2nd Research Period (1st May 2020 – 30th June 2021).

CD-MAKE 2021: Call for papers!

Submit your best new manuscript now for CD-MAKE 2021 – the International IFIP Cross Domain (CD) Conference for Machine Learning & Knowledge Extraction (MAKE)! The Deadline for submission will be extended into April. CD-MAKE 2021 takes place from 17-20 August at the Technical University (TU) in Vienna, Austria, but the organisers are prepared to convert the meeting to an all-digital event if needed (dates would remain the same). It is an important FeatureCloud event and is held in conjunction with the International Conference on Availability, Reliability & Security, ARES 2021.

More information

New FeatureCloud publication on automated medical decision making

In their newest paper, Prof. Holzinger and colleagues describe a novel holistic approach to an automated medical decision pipeline that builds on the latest machine learning research, integrating the human-in-the-loop via an innovative, interactive, and exploration-based explainability technique called counterfactual graphs. The publication outlines how multi-modal representations enable joint learning of a single outcome, how embeddings can be learned in a distributed manner securely and efficiently, and how to leverage counterfactual paths for intuitive explainability and causability.

More information

The FeatureCloud App Store is born!

The FeatureCloud App Store is now ready! With this novel software platform and app store, we are trying to revolutionise privacy-aware AI for healthcare. Check it out. You can easily create projects, use analysis apps, build machine learning models without programming knowledge, and collaborate with other institutions without sharing your datasets. It’s an entirely new approach and a concept that we hope will be widely used by medical doctors, researchers, and developers.

More information

H2020 Synergy – ECSCI

Also in this summer, FeatureCloud joined the European Cluster for Securing Critical Infrastructures. ECSCI is a cluster of H2020 projects for securing critical infrastructures. Its main objective is to bring about synergetic, emerging disruptive solutions to security issues via cross-projects collaboration and innovation. The cluster will research how to protect critical infrastructures and services, highlighting differences (approaches, sectors of interest, etc.) between the clustered projects and establishing tight and productive connections with closely related and complementary H2020 projects.

More information

H2020 Synergy – SPHINX

Starting in August FeatureCloud is collaborating with the related H2020 project SPHINX in the field of cybersecurity in the healthcare sector. The main target of this synergy is to identify common problems, discuss about the practices that each project prepares, and establish a joint task force. All the projects that are members of this synergy are oriented to cybersecurity in Health sector, so it is more than useful to exchange information and observe the different methodologies and approaches and how they are implemented, so we can all develop effective practices during the lifetime of our projects.

More information

Reporting of 1st research period submitted to EU

Click here to read the Publishable Summary of the 1st Research Period (1st January 2019 – 30th April 2020).

Identification of drug repurposing candidates for treatment of Covid-19

In order to find out which existing drugs might be suitable for the treatment of Covid-19, numerous research groups from all over the world are working on systems medicine approaches. A research team from the Chair of Experimental Bioinformatics (ExBio) at the TUM School of Life Sciences of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now developed the first online data analysis platform (CoVex) for this purpose:

The Coronavirus Explorer (CoVex) integrates the virus-human interactome for SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV. CoVex is designed to help provide a comprehensive understanding of the infection mechanisms and focuses not only on the virus and its direct interaction partners, but in particular involves the host-protein interaction network.

Click here to watch our new video on YouTube:

Final COST action OpenMultiMed Conference on Multiscale Systems and Network Medicine

Our main objective is to gather a critical mass of researchers and stakeholders from different disciplines and coordinate these researchers as a team to define, investigate important S&T challenges in multiscale systems medicine and to improve existing and develop novel solutions for multiscale systems medicine. ​

International Conference on Systems and Network Medicine

18 – 19 March 2020

TranslaTUM, Technischen Universität München

Einsteinstraße 25, 81675 Munich, Germany

FeatureCloud project flyer now available!

Click on the thumbnail image on the left to view the web version of the new FeatureCloud project flyer (in DIN A5 size). For distribution at scientific conferences, there are 2 different print versions available for project members via Keyways, one with scientists as the primary target group, one with patients & the public as the primary target group.

FeatureCloud Workshop for Developers

27 – 29 November 2019

A lot of thoughts and effort have already been put into the platform architecture this year. In this workshop, we would like to take a close look at all the requirements again and decide on the final technologies considering as many perspectives as possible – ranging from privacy awareness to user experience.

FeatureCloud at Convergence 2019

FeatureCloud at SRE 2019

FeatureCloud members Rudolf Mayer from SBA Research and Walter Hötzendorfer from Research Institute presented the FeatureCloud project at the “Security Research Event 2019” in Helsinki (6-7 Nov 2019).

CD-MAKE 2019

Prof. Dr. Andreas Holzinger and colleagues again organised the “Cross-Domain Conference for Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction” (CD-MAKE 2019) that was co-located with ARES 2019 in Canterbury, UK, August 26-29, 2019.

Follow us!

On the FeatureCloud Twitter account, we post frequent updates about the newest project developments and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) research, federated learning, cloud design, and blockchain technology!

FeatureCloud takes off!

Today, the 5-year long, pan-European research & development project began. We are excited to roll up our sleeves and start work!