  BIRDS stands for "Bioinformatics and Information Retrieval Data Structures
analysis and design" and is a 4-year project (2016--2019) that has received
funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 690941.
  The overall goal of BIRDS is to establish a long term international network
involving leading researchers in the development of efficient data structures
in the fields of Bioinformatics and Information Retrieval, to strengthen the
partnership through the exchange of knowledge and expertise, and to develop
integrated approaches to improve current approaches in both fields. The
research will address challenges in storing, processing, indexing, searching
and navigating genome-scale data by designing new algorithms and data
structures for sequence analysis, networks representation or compressing and
indexing repetitive data.
  BIRDS project is carried out by 7 research institutions from Australia
(University of Melbourne), Chile (University of Chile and University of
Concepci\'on), Finland (University of Helsinki), Japan (Kyushu University),
Portugal (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores,
Investiga\c{c}\~ao e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, INESC-ID), and Spain
(University of A Coru\~na), and a Spanish SME (Enxenio S.L.). It is coordinated
by the University of A Coru\~na (Spain).
