Dear metagenome method developers,
The first challenge of the Initiative for the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) begins right now! Over the last three months, we received valuable feedback from the community playing with our toy data sets. We incorporated many of your suggestions, thanks again!
Today, we proudly release the official data sets for the CAMI challenge.
The first part of the competition – metagenome assembly, profiling and (taxonomic) binning of raw read data – starts today. You have six weeks to complete this task and to submit your results until Friday, May 8, 2015. The second part of the challenge – (taxonomic) binning and profiling using assembled data – follows immediately and closes Friday, June 19, 2015. For the second challenge gold standard assemblies will be provided on May 9, 2015.
Head over to https://data.cami-challenge.org to get started! We are looking forward to receiving your reproducible results! CAMI will represent all submitted results in anonymous form and indicate their performance using a range of metrics in comparisons to other tools. So you will be able to use the site to facilitate your benchmarking efforts, already you can do so when submitting results for the provided toy data sets.
We also build upon and are part of the bioboxes community effort –https://github.com/bioboxes/rfc – and ask all CAMI participants to submit their methods standardized inside Docker containers. We are aware of the technical overhead and thus offer our help to prepare your bioboxes. Once integrated, this will allow you to continuously update your method and monitor its performance also for novel challenging data sets, that we will provide in the future.
We wish to include all participants as co-authors on the joint CAMI publication, given that their results are reproducible. Additionally, we will distribute three participation awards of 1000 EUR each among participants across all categories performing better than a baseline method. Two more reasons to join the CAMI challenge!
Lastly, we cordially invite you to the CAMI evaluation meeting in Berlin, May 27—29, 2015. Mark the date and drop us a message if you would like to attend and work with us on the final evaluation metrics and become part of the CAMI team.
Please check the FAQ, mail support@cami-challenge.org or tweet @CAMI_challenge with any feedback, questions or problems. We’re here to help!
Please note the following important changes:
– Changed binning and profiling formats.
– A new camiClient for format validation and fast parallel up- and download.
We are looking forward to your submissions!
The CAMI Team
http://cami-challenge.org
Twitter: @CAMI_challenge