392160 Graph Neural Networks in Biology (S) (SoSe 2025)

The recent surge of Machine Learning (ML) has opened up various opportunities when analysing biological datasets. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a fairly new deep learning model capable of handling biological data in the best way overall.
The seminar will start with a few (around 4 or 5) introductory lectures on Graph Representation Learning basics and Graph Neural Networks. The earliest and most recent approaches will be discussed, together with their use cases and drawbacks. The initial set of lectures will be followed by two lectures in which it will be presented how to write technical reports and how to prepare a good presentation.
Then seminar presentations will take place, and they will need to be presented in small groups of 1-2 students.
The course will be seminar+tutorial style, thus students will: 1. present a chosen paper; 2. deliver a final report of around 10 pages; 3. weekly deliver a summary of the presentation that took place during that week (around 500 words long).

The course will is entirely held in English.