Bosc

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.

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.

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.

CollaborationFest, CoFest for short, is a collaborative work event that has been held each of the past 13 years as a satellite event of BOSC. At these free events, held right before or after BOSC, participants  gather in small groups to exchange ideas and work together on projects including but not limited to hacking. Participants were encouraged to submit their project ideas in advance to facilitate collaboration.

CoFest 2023 took place during the two days just before BOSC, which was part of ISMB/ECCB 2023 in Lyon and online. It was the first in-person edition after several online-only CoFests, due to Covid pandemics. It was hosted by Jérémy Just at the nearby École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, which provided space and infrastructure, with funding from Complex Systems Institute for lunches and coffee breaks. Free virtual machines were made available by the French Institute for Bioinformatics and the Pôle scientifique de modélisation numérique.

Sierra Moxon to speak about “LinkML: an open data modeling framework, grounded with ontologies”

[If you missed the webinar, the video is here and the slides are here.]

ISCBacademy is a series of free webinars sponsored by the International Society for Computational Biology. They are open to all, including those who are not ISCB members. ISCB members can access the webinars via the ISCB Nucleus platform: https://iscb.junolive.co/. Non-members need to register for Nucleus: https://iscb.swoogo.com/ISCBnucleus-registration

The 24th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2023, took place as part of ISMB/ECCB 2023 in Lyon, France, and online. ISMB/ECCB attracted a near-record number of attendees, with over 2100 in person and  about 900 more online.

Most of the BOSC organizing committee (missing: Jessica Maia and Chris Fields)A full room at BOSC 2023

The opening session of BOSC kicked off with a welcome from chair Nomi Harris. An overview of BOSC’s parent organization, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, was presented by OBF Board member Bastian Greshake Tzovaras.

Diversity, inclusion and accessibility (also known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, DEI) are a major part of BOSC’s mission and core values, and we pursue these goals in multiple ways. BOSC 2022, for example, included a panel on Building and Sustaining Inclusive Open Science Communities, with panelists who not only were experts on the topic but also themselves belong to various groups that are typically underrepresented in our community. And with generous support from our sponsors, each year we provide free registration to 10-20 BOSC participants as part of the OBF Event Fellowship program), which aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics and open science.