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 Concepción), Finland (University of Helsinki), Japan (Kyushu University), Portugal (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, INESC-ID), and Spain (University of A Coruña), and a Spanish SME (Enxenio S.L.). It is coordinated by the University of A Coruña (Spain).