Bosc

We invite you to join us for BOSC 2025, a vibrant gathering at the forefront of open-source bioinformatics and open science!

• Location: Liverpool, UK, and virtual
• Dates: July 21-22, 2025
• Website: /events/bosc/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14344023/
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bosc.bsky.social
• Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/obf-bosc/shared_invite/zt-n5ur1gsj-z2C~69_4lYTFPg5tbWA8Ew

Key Dates

• January 16, 2025: Deadline for community nominations of keynote speakers
• April 17: Deadline for submitting talk/poster abstracts
• May 13: Talk/poster acceptance notifications
• May 15: Late poster submission deadline
• July 20-24: ISMB/ECCB 2025
• July 21-22: BOSC 2025 (the first two full days of ISMB/ECCB 2025)
• July 23-24: ISMB CollaborationFest

About BOSC

The talk videos from BOSC 2024 are now available on YouTube. They are also linked from the BOSC talk schedule (scroll down to “Talks”).

Stay tuned - our full report on BOSC 2024 will be published soon!

By Beatrice Mihalache

Examining open source projects has been most useful to me while I am sharpening my coding skills, so I was excited to learn about the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference – BOSC.  I am a rising senior at UCLA, studying biophysics and data science. I strongly believe in open source, so I submitted the work I’d done with my PI and my grad student collaborator for a poster presentation at BOSC. My research lab at UCLA allocates conference participation funds only for graduate students, therefore I also included a request for fee waiver with my conference submission. I was excited when a few weeks later I received notification that not only I was accepted as a poster presenter, but that I also got free registration to both BOSC and to the entire ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference!

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.

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.