QuoData at the BVL Symposium 2020
Data-Science and the laboratory of the future
The symposium "Data Science / Labor 4.0 – die digitale Transformation" organized by the German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (Bundesamt für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit, BVL) took place on 6th October 2020. This year’s BVL symposium was organized in a hybrid online format.
Themenschwerpunkt war die Nutzung von „Big Data“ und die Anwendung maschinellen Lernens in der Lebensmittelsicherheit und die bisher in dieser Hinsicht beschrittenen Wege. Referenten aus verschiedenen Institutionen, wie Universitäten, Untersuchungsämtern, Behörden und der freien Wirtschaft hielten Vorträge und tauschten sich in Paneldiskussionen aus.
The focus of the symposium was on digital transformation enabling the laboratories of the future. This is driven by a combination of several aspects including -
- New measurement platforms and state of the art instruments
- Availability of large amount of high-resolution measurement data per sample
- Robotics and automation of processes
- Advancement in computational power and databases
- Novel machine learning models and artificial intelligence to process the data
QuoData with its expertise and experience, finds itself in a unique position to bridge the above aspects together in order to ensure high level of reliability of measurements & processes. This is critical for not only ensuring validity of results, but also for retaining trust through quality assurance.
The symposium brought together experts from different fields to bridge the way to the next generation of laboratories. QuoData is humbled to also play a role in this.
Through several plenary talks and panel discussions, the central theme was – how can we prepare ourselves for these laboratories of the future?
QuoData was involved in two important themes:
- Management and processing of measurement data
Within this theme, Kapil Nichani, data scientist at QuoData, gave a talk on fundamentals of machine learning and its role in the laboratory.
The slide deck can be accessed here. - Validation, standardization, and norms
The managing director of QuoData PD Dr. habil. Steffen Uhlig discussed the importance of validation of methods in Laboratory 4.0, and proposed ways on how we can proceed with it. With non-target (un-targeted) methods being increasingly developed, he discussed how can we perform non-target method validation and the first experiences made.
The presentation slides can be found here.