DREAM - Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods

According to the website, DREAM is a Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods:

“The main objective is to catalyze the interaction between experiment and theory in the area of cellular network inference and quantitative model building in systems biology.”

Not clear?

“DREAM (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) poses fundamental questions about systems biology, and invites participants to propose solutions. The main objective is to catalyze the interaction between theory and experiment, specifically in the area of cellular network inference and quantitative model building. DREAM challenges address how we can assess the quality of our descriptions of networks that underlie biological systems, and of our predictions of the outcomes of novel experiments. These are not simple questions. Researchers have used a variety of algorithms to deduce the structure of biological networks and/or to predict the outcome of perturbations to their systems. They have also evaluated the success of their methodologies using a diverse set of non-standardised metrics. What is still needed, and what DREAM aims to achieve, is a fair comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of these methods and a clear sense of the reliability of the models that researchers create.”

I know a bit about Systems Biology but I must admit to being confused about the “Assessment and Methods” part of DREAM. I think it means that DREAM is about assessing methods and models for reverse engineering biological systems (i.e. Systems Biology), even though it reads that they are trying to reverse engineer assessments and methods. Such dedication to the acronym over clarity makes DREAM a worthy ORCA entry.