Approaches to biomedical knowledge

Course Overview

This course is held as a part of the Master Curriculum in Bioinformatics of the Free University Berlin.

Topics

The course explores the synergy between two paradigms:

Is AI ruining our skills?

Non-skilling

• Currently, the best answer appears to be: “Some of them, but it will make others more productive”.
• This course enables students to master two essential frameworks for managing human knowledge in bioinformatics: Ontologies and Language Models.
• We will go into detail and implement simplified versions of some of the algorithms in Python.
• Prerequisites: Some knowledge of probability, calculus, and algorithms (We will explain everything as we go along).

Advice

• Do not use LLMs to do homework assignments!
• It is probably OK to ask specific questions with well crafted prompts, but be sure to study the answer and ideally the original source rather than merely copy and pasting.
• Vibe coding is not to be recommended but LLMs can be quite helpful with targeted questions (e.g., what CSS class makes a rounded box that looks like an orange parakeet?) or to get advice on how to optimize code (e.g., using iterators instead of traditional forloops in Languages such as Rust and Java).

Further Reading:

• Pearson, H. (2025). Are the Internet and AI affecting our memory? What the science says. Nature.
• Lenharo, M. (2026). Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good. Nature.