BIRDS kick-off meeting was held at the University of A Coruña, Spain, on January 20th, 2016. Its main purpose was firstly to allow the participants to get to know each other and establish lines of communication. In addition, it was organized to plan the start of the project, to delineate the final terms and conditions of the consortium agreement, to review the secondments, tasks, activities and deliverables for the first year of the project, and finally to discuss the monitoring of the project progress and reporting.
The meeting was embedded within the first scientific workshop organized by the project, the StringMasters A Coruña 2016, which took place on January 18th-20th, 2016. A total of 20 participants from 11 different institutions (from 8 different countries) studied and discussed topics related with BIRDS.
The meeting was very fruitful and had a lively atmosphere. There was much detailed discussion on several open problems on data structures for bioinformatics and information retrieval. Finally the importance of knowledge transfer activities was stressed.