This is a call for problems for the online Bioinformatics Contest.

We have been holding the Contest since 2017 (https://bioinf.me/en/contest), and we hope to make it more diverse and international in the upcoming years. An important step in that direction for us is to ask the bioinformatics community to help us with the problem set.

Why you may be interested in providing a problem for the Contest?
– to advertise your research in the bioinformatics community;
– to attract young promising researchers to your lab (more than 3000 people participate in the contest annually!);
– to observe a huge variety of approaches to your problem (the problem doesn’t have to be solvable in a unique way).
We are proud to let you know that a team of world-class sport programmers is helping us with the development of the machinery for each problem: simulation of instances, tests, jury solutions, etc. This may also lead to a fruitful collaboration: last year one of the problems from the contest evolved into a paper accepted to the RECOMB Comparative Genomics 2019 conference.

We welcome problems formulated at any stage: from just a general idea, to a full problem with the input data and possible solutions.

We support different types of problems. In particular, a problem can:
– have an exact solution (that yields a 100% score) or not (the participants will compete to solve it as close as possible to the optimal solution, for example: https://stepik.org/lesson/199950/step/2?unit=184372);
– require biological knowledge (but it should be searchable, for example https://stepik.org/lesson/67626/step/2?unit=44981);
– be interactive: coming up with a solution also provides additional knowledge to the participant (for example, https://stepik.org/lesson/40926/step/1?unit=19662);
– be solvable with the use of existing bioinformatics tools (for example, https://stepik.org/lesson/74888/step/2?unit=51835).

The only constraint is that the problem should not require a high performance system to solve it (cloud, cluster, GPU units, ...).

The problems from the previous contests can be found here:
– 2019: https://stepik.org/course/Bioinformatics-Contest-2019-43615
– 2018: https://stepik.org/course/Bioinformatics-Contest-2018-4377
– 2017: https://stepik.org/course/Bioinformatics-Contest-2017-945

Feel free to share this message with your colleagues who may also be interested. If you participated in previous years and enjoyed the Contest, please, spread this call for problems among your colleagues/teachers. And don’t hesitate to propose a problem to us!