Community training and outreach activities of the BD2K-LINCS data coordination and integration center (DCIC)
Creators: name: Jenkins, Sherry
name: Schürer, Stephan
name: Medvedovic, Mario
name: Ma'ayan, Avi
Publisher: name: F1000Research
Year: 2016

description: The Data Coordination and Integration Center (DCIC) for the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) program has four major components: Integrated Knowledge Environment (IKE), Data Science Research (DSR), Consortium Coordination and Administration (CCA), and Community Training and Outreach (CTO). The CTO component of our center engages, informs and educates key biomedical research communities about LINCS data and resources. The CTO efforts have established several educational programs including a LINCS massive online open course (MOOC), a summer undergraduate research program, the initiation and support of diverse collaborative projects leveraging LINCS resources, and the systematic dissemination of LINCS data and tools via a variety of mechanisms. We use innovative crowdsourcing and outreach mechanisms to harness expertise of the wider Data Science and software development communities for benefiting the LINCS community. Recent activities of our CTO component include:<br> 

	A LINCS-related MOOC: “Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center” https://www.coursera.org/learn/bd2k-lincs designed to train biomedical researchers with LINCS-related experimental methods, datasets, and computational tools.
	Our second cohort of students for our BD2K-LINCS DCIC Summer Research Training Program in Biomedical Big Data Science. This is a research-intensive ten-week training program for undergraduate and graduate students.
	Establishment of the webinar series “LINCS Data Science Research Webinars” which provides a forum for data scientists within and outside of the LINCS program to present their work on problems related to LINCS data analysis and integration. These webinars are posted on our YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Bwuj8819U-G9Ob0jIGHp5AtwpCghLV5 
	The development of the CREEDS (Crowd Extracted Expression of Differential Signatures) Portal which is a collection of processed gene, drug and disease signatures from (Gene Expression Omnibus GEO). This resource is the results of the crowdsourcing project that was conducted by ~100 students from around the world who took our BD2K MOOC on Coursera. The students collectively extracted over 6000 gene expression signatures from GEO and an article about the project was recently published (Wang <i>et al</i>. Extraction and Analysis of Signatures from the Gene Expression Omnibus by the Crowd. <i>Nature Communications</i> 2016).
	Engagement in collaborative external data science research projects which focus on mining and integrating data generated by the LINCS program for new scientific discovery.
	Hosting of symposia, seminars and workshops to bring together the DCIC and researchers who utilize LINCS resources.
	The development and maintenance of the lincs-dcic.org and lincsproject.org websites as well as an active presence on various social media platforms including YouTube, Google+, and Twitter.

In achieving our milestones, we established comprehensive education, outreach, and training programs aimed at scientific communities that can benefit from LINCS data and tools. We expect that the LINCS community will continue to grow into a resourceful network that brings together researchers across disciplines and organizations. The innovative data management solutions that we bring to LINCS can be leveraged for many other resources and become widespread.