


HackBio
When is it?
Monday, March 24, 2025 to Wednesday, April 2, 2025.
Where is it?
A virtual hackathon with students joining in from McGill, Waterloo and other campuses.
Kickoff will be in-person at 680 Sherbrooke (McGill Campus), with an option to join virtually via Discord.
Discord access at: https://discord.gg/A5eTtanN
Kickoff is on Monday, March 24th at 6:30 PM ET
at 680 Sherbrooke (680 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal, QC H3A 2M7), tentatively for room 1914.
What is happening?
A one-week long hackathon where university students & industry folks build models to solve bio challenges. The main challenge is to solve the Perturbation Prediction challenge presented at Neurips 2023, where hackathon participants will use ML models to predict protein expression profiles in cells after being exposed to drug candidates. This task is important for ML in biology, because successfully predicting cell profiles can speed up developing safer and effective medication via drug discovery.
Why is it happening?
After hosting 3 benchmarking hackathons in the past 5 months (HackOS 1, 2, 3) at McGill and Waterloo, we’ve steadily grown a student & developer community on campus and want to approach SOTA results as soon as we can on hard problems.
How many people are joining?
Aiming for 100+ signups across McGill & Waterloo
