38C3 Community Stages

Computing Genomes & what that has to do with privacy
2024-12-30 , Stage YELL
Language: English

What does it take to get a Genome into the computer?
A slightly technical, political and personal dive into the field of genomics.


This will be in the first part an introductory talk to Genomics, covering "How do you get a genome into your computer?". As I'm a bioinformaticist, i will briefly mention sequencing, but focus on the computation. Because it turns out that getting a human genome into your computer involves a lot of computation!

In the second part i will outline where privacy comes in here, and why it is essential, if we want to do work with genomic data responsibly. Understanding privacy goes beyond the technical: economic incentives, legal policy and security need to be taken into consideration to protect genomic data adequately.

In the third part i will tell of a University program which i organized in which we did our own Genomic Analysis with students, as privacy preserving and digitally sovereign as possible, and tell of the challenges we faced and the learnings we made.

Multifunctional nerd. I like maps, molecular biology, genomes and privacy. Oh also Computers.