Phylo2vec: Accelerating Phylogenetic ResearchPlease join us from 11-12.30 on Friday, September 19th at Huxley 410 to learn about recent contributions to the phylo2vec package.Phylogenetic trees are diagrams that illustrate species’ shared evolutionary history. Represented as bifurcating binary trees, these trees also represent similar relationships such as tracing the similarities between languages.Given the importance of this data structure, a plethora of corresponding software currently exists. However, the current standard for representing a phylogenetic tree is a string. This creates inefficiencies as scale increases. Phylo2vec, rather, represents phylogenetic trees as integer vectors. This representation requires substantially less storage, and thus enables more efficient tree operations.Our latest contributions have completely rewritten the core component of Phylo2vec in Rust, boosting both performance and memory efficiency—while still maintaining the Python and R APIs. We’ve also implemented several optimizations to reduce time complexity.Whether you’re a phylogenetics enthusiast or simply curious about developing scientific packages, using Rust, using GitHub Actions, or performing proper benchmarking, join our workshop and experience it firsthand! The session will last 1 hour 30 minutes, and all participants will receive a £10 lunch voucher afterward. Please bring a laptop so you can follow along and try things out yourself!The workshop is co-organised by the University of Copenhagen (Neil Scheidwasser, Prince Ravi Leow, Samir Bhatt), the eScience institute (Anshul Tambay, Don Setiawan), and the Statistics Section of the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London (Oliver Ratmann)