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The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2024, round 2, is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 August 2024. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events that promote open-source bioinformatics and/or open science. We invite applications from candidates seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events from September 2024 to March 2025. These events include conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

This year will mark the 15th edition of the BOSC-associated CollaborationFest, or CoFest for short. At these events, participants work together on code, documentation, training materials, use cases, and analyses.

CoFest 2024 will take place on July 17-18, right after ISMB and BOSC 2024. This will be a hybrid event, hosted at UQAM | Université du Québec à Montréal and online. Many thanks to Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo , BF Francis Ouellette, and Karen Reynard for finding and donating the use of this venue!

BOSC is an entirely volunteer-run event. We have an organizing committee of 8 people (see /events/bosc-2024/), and we are assisted by a larger review committee. The review committee is responsible for reading all the submitted abstracts and assessing them for quality and appropriateness to BOSC. You can read more about our review process here.

Our tentative review committee for 2024 is listed below. If you have any concerns about anyone on the list, please contact us at bosc@open-bio.org (that mailing list is private to the organizing committee and is not accessible to the larger review committee) or private-message any of the organizing committee members by email or in Slack.

A PhD student’s perspective on attending the 17th Annual International Biocuration Conference in Faridabad, India

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Thea Fennell, a PhD Researcher at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the 17th Annual International Biocuration Conference.

“The best use for your data will be thought of by someone else” — Rufus Pollock encapsulates this concept in all its power and humility. It is at the core of open science and biocuration. Almost by definition, FAIR data is non-proprietary, yet the work done to generate, curate, and share it is invaluable. Recent proceedings at the 17th Annual International Biocuration Conference (AIBC), hosted at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC) in Faridabad, were a testament to this duality.

Gemma Turon, PhD spoke at an ISCBacademy webinar on March 5, 2024. Her talk was entitled “Ersilia, open source AI/ML for (antimicrobial) drug discovery”. The talk video is now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcEkCuJpZbw. Dr. Turon’s bio and talk abstract can be found in this blog post.

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2024, round 1, is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 2024. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events that promote open-source bioinformatics and/or open science. We invite applications from candidates seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events from May 2024 to December 2024. These events include conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

Abstract submission for BOSC 2024 is now open! Since some people can’t get conference travel approval from their institution until they get confirmation that their abstract has been accepted for a presentation, we started offering Early Poster Acceptance last year, and we are continuing the experiment this year. If you submit your abstract by March 21, 2024, we will notify you by March 29 whether it has been accepted or not for (at least) a poster.

Gemma Turon, PhD (CEO and co-founder at Ersilia Open Source Initiative) will present on March 5

BOSC and the OBF will host an ISCBacademy webinar on March 5, 2024, at 8am PST (16:00 UTC). Gemma Turon (see bio below) will speak about “Ersilia, open source AI/ML for (antimicrobial) drug discovery”.

Abstract

The Ersilia Open-Source Initiative is a non-profit organisation whose mission is to equip laboratories, clinics and universities in lower and middle income countries (LMICs) with artificial intelligence (AI) tools for infectious disease research. The goal of our mission is to strengthen the research capacity in those countries where these diseases are predominant, supporting the in-country drug discovery pipelines for neglected and infectious diseases. Since its foundation in 2020, we have collaborated with several institutions in the Global South as well as international consortiums. In this introductory talk we will present our computational approach and infrastructure, including the Ersilia Model Hub, a unified platform offering ready- to-use AI models to researchers worldwide, and how we have used it across multiple projects, offering a perspective on how AI/ML can transform drug discovery and contribute towards a more egalitarian world of biomedical research.

We asked our community to nominate potential BOSC keynote speakers, and we were pleased with the great suggestions! In the next phase of our process, we’re giving you a chance to let us know if there is anything that makes any of the nominated individuals NOT appropriate as BOSC keynote speakers.

Our invited speaker process and rubric gives examples of some possible reasons for exclusion. If you have concerns about any of the people on our list, please let us know (with as much specificity as you feel comfortable providing) via this anonymous form no later than Thursday 2024-01-25.

We are seeking a diverse list of potential BOSC keynote speakers. We invite you, our community, to nominate people you think would be appropriate (and at least somewhat likely to accept the invitation – for example, it is extremely unlikely that we would get a ‘yes’ from a recent Nobel Laureate). Please submit your nominations here (as many as you like; you can fill out the form more than once to submit additional suggestions) by the end of the day on Wednesday 2024-01-17.