This session will be an interactive workshop led by GitHub Social Impact and Ersilia on developing data-driven tools for researchers in low-and-middle income countries in a participatory way.

https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/session/J3LKS8-1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TJDMx4gN4Y&t=160s
https://socialimpact.github.com/insights/Skills-Based-Volunteering-case-study-with-Ersilia/

March 23rd 2023

Ersilia is a tech nonprofit that created an open source platform for infectious and neglected disease researchers, wet-lab scientists and clinicians to use and run machine learning (ML)/ artificial intelligence model predictions. The session will start with challenges in drug development for low resourced regions and what open source and open data in life sciences mean. Next, we will showcase the collaboration between Ersilia and GitHub’s Skills-Based Volunteering Program where GitHub employees volunteered their time to this project that sped up ML model deployment for infectious disease research, including a demonstration of the pipelines in this collaboration. This hands-on workshop will demonstrate the new model submission flow from the perspective of a research scientist where an audience member can receive a model, submit it to Ersilia, then have it approved and merged. Next, we will showcase how GitHub and Ersilia were able to solve the managing dependencies, such as security issues, that Ersilia was facing. The session will conclude with an open table from the audience with the following goals: i) how can this model of collaboration be extrapolated to other areas of tech for good ii) what dissemination actions should be undertaken to encourage OS contributors iii) which features are needed to increase diversity in the teams co-creating open source resources.