2020-08-20-james-alex.md

layout	post
title	How to make beer better
author	@pweschmidt
rse	James Collier & Alexander Botzki
phenotype
excerpt	Have you ever wondered how AI can improve the taste of beer? Look no further than the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), where James Collier and Alexander Botzki are working hard to help beer lovers enjoy their drinks even more.
date	2020-08-20 01:30:00 -0700
external_media	https://us-rse.org/rse-stories-episodes-1/2020/rse-stories-james-alex-episode30.mp3
length	10084227
duration	00:20:59
explicit	no
resources	name url VIB https://vib.be name url VIB Bioinformatics Core https://corefacilities.vib.be/bits name url Belgian Research Software Developers Day 2020 https://www.be-rse.org/rsdd2020 name url Elixir Belgium https://www.elixir-belgium.org

For this episode our journey through RSE land takes us to Belgium. James Collier and Alexander Botzki work at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie - VIB). Belgium being famous (amongst many other things) for its beers, lovers of the beverage will appreciate the work James and Alexander do to improve its taste using software technologies such as machine learning. Equally important to their work is community building. They are deeply involved with the Elixir project, a pan-European network for life sciences. Realizing the importance of software engineering in research, they recently set up an RSE association for Belgium. Alex and James are excited to announce their first Research Software Developers Day on 3 Dec 2020.

Other Interesting Links

• Belgian Beer App from Supinya Piampongsant at the Kevin Verstrepen lab (data collection, experiments, AI). VIB Bioinformatics Core provided the web-site.
• Flemish Gut Flora: at the Jeroen Raes Lab.