Abstract
IntroductionChemHouse is a research group of around 50 members, bringing together experts in chemometrics, users and PhD students from partner institutes and companies. The objective of ChemHouse is to help its partners to overcome methodological barriers and difficulties in the use of chemometrics by: -scientific animation in chemometrics, -welcoming students and researchers, -chemometric tools (CheMoocs, ChemFlow, ChemData), -workshops and research schools (ChemOmics, ChemSchool)-project building.Material and methods Every fortnight, a member (or an outsider, invited by a member) leads a scientific seminar based on a presentation on a topic of his choice, related to operational and research issues in chemometrics. At the same time, students and researchers are regularly welcomed (for weeks to months) to exchange on scientific subjects, and to improve their data processing skills. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), CheMoocs, was also created to train students and researchers on chemometric methods that ChemHouse members use or have developed. CheMoocs exercices are based on the Galaxy instance ‘ChemFlow’, and an open database ‘ChemData’.ChemHouse members organize workshops and chemometrics events. In addition, because of similarities and complementarities between chemometrics and metabolomics, the two communities meet and exchange during collaborations and conferences. ChemOmics is a group of researchers and users formed to regularly organize joint schools.ChemHouse members initiate and collaborate together on research projects, to go deeper into data analysis by developing workflows, tools and algorithms.Results and discussionAround 20 scientific presentations are held each year on different topics such as: Near Infrared Spectroscopy data modeling, pre-processing of spectra, variable selection, variants of PLS modelling… In parallel, researchers are hosted on average 9 months per year.CheMoocs is currently composed of 28 modules gathered into 2 sessions: unsupervised and supervised methods. This course is annually followed by around 1500 people. With ChemFlow, a free and open-source software, they can upload various data types, create interactive graphs, and apply conventional and more advanced chemometric methods. ChemData collects datasets from the MOOC, from public projects of the ChemHouse group, or from external repositories.Concerning the events, ChemHouse organizes in collaboration with the COST action Sensorfint, a workshop 'ChemSchool' in September. The third session of ‘ChemOmics’ will also take place this year in October. In addition, ChemHouse participates in the setting up and implementation of national (Digitbio-MIMS) and international (Explore, AVITech) projects.ConclusionChemHouse offers a complete environment designed by and for chemometrics, grouped together in ‘ChemProject’ (https://chemproject.org/). ChemProject is aimed to enable as many people as possible to practice chemometrics. It is based on 3 pillars: CheMoocs which provides theoretical knowledge in chemometrics, ChemFlow which offers the main methods encountered in chemometrics, and ChemData that contains downloadable public data. ChemHouse is also open to methodological exchanges, collaboration on scientific projects, and offers training activities.