Join us at BOSC 2021!

BOSC 2021 will take place July 29-30, as part of ISMB/ECCB 2021 Online.

Key Dates

May 6, 2021 (11:59pm EDT): Deadline for submitting one-page talk/poster abstracts May 27: Talk/poster acceptance notifications June 3: Late poster (and Late-Breaking Lightning Talk) submission deadline June 10: Late poster / LBLT acceptance notifications July 29-30: BOSC 2021 Online (part of ISMB/ECCB 2021 Online) July 31-Aug 1: CollaborationFest (CoFest)

About BOSC 2021

BOSC is returning to ISMB in 2021, after a successful partnership with Galaxy for the first Bioinformatics Community Conference last year (BCC2020 online). Originally slated to take place in Lyon, France, ISMB/ECCB 2021 will be held online, and features over a dozen tracks, including BOSC. As usual, BOSC will include keynote talks, longer and shorter (lightning) talks from submitted abstracts, posters, Birds of a Feather, and more!

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Call for applications for OBF Event Fellowship, Round 1 of 2021

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2021, round 1 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 2021. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form.

We invite applications from candidates who are seeking financial support to attend or host virtual events in 2021. The selected awardees can use the OBF Event Fellowship to cover conference registration fees and potentially additional expenses associated with attending or hosting the event, such as small hardware (microphone, speaker, webcam), childcare for the duration of the event and high-speed internet. Like last year, in this round, we will consider applications to attend or host virtual events only. This decision has been made due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic induced lockdown and restricted travels. Expenses that will be incurred by remote participation have to be justified in the application and will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

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MetaDocencia: Teaching to Teach (Bioinformatics and more) Online in Spanish

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. Dr. Laura Ación , a researcher at the Instituto de Cálculo, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina . She is also one of the co-founders of MetaDocencia , which she could partly support with the OBF Event fellowship granted to her in the December 2019 application round.

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H3ABionet’s Introduction to Bioinformatics Training (IBT) 2020: a report of the first iteration hosted in Cameroon

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. Armando Blondel DJIYOU DJEUDA, a researcher from University of Douala, Cameroon, set up and host H3ABioNet‘s Introduction to Bioinformatics course (IBT), supported by this fellowship granted to him in application round 1 of 2020.

Due to the rich biodiversity of sub-Saharan African countries, bioinformatics and data management are crucial in helping to advance biomedical research. While many African countries are emerging in those specific fields, Cameroon and Central African countries in general, are still lagging behind. Based on this observation, in 2019, we created Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Hub (B2Hub) at the Biotechnology Center of the University of Yaounde I. Our aim through this platform is to promote bioinformatics and biostatistics among graduate students and young researchers from Central Africa.

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Smart computational imaging: a report from CLEO 2020

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. Pengfei Fan, a researcher from Queen Mary University of London, was supported to participate in CLEO 2020 by this fellowship granted to him in the application round-1 of 2020. Find more information here.

During the last two decades, we are witnessing a fascinating growth of computational imaging (CI) methods, e.g. tomography, compressive sensing and 3D/super-resolved/lensless microscopy, and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, mainly machine learning and deep learning, both from the theoretical (mathematical) and practical (experimental) point of view. New computational capabilities in terms of, e.g., big data, large scale optimisation, neural networks and highly parallel computing, are facilitating further improvements in numerically enhanced imaging surpassing the limitations imposed by ‘classical’ all-optical information processing systems. It is joyful to observe how CI and AI merge to innovatively address challenging tasks fuelled by wide-spreading applications in 3D imaging, biomedicine, microscopy and general physics of light propagation in scattering media, to name just a few. When designing a computational imaging technique, one needs to originally link the applicable data acquisition scheme with the capable image reconstruction algorithm, often aided by learning-based frameworks employed not only for image classification and interpretation but also for image formation and final outcome restoration. As the AI stimulatory development continues to flourish, open-source tools and software, especially deep learning framework and platform, have become a key ingredient of modern science. Hundreds of software packages, libraries, and applications have become essential tools.

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Call for applications for OBF Event Fellowship, Round 2 of 2020

We are glad to announce that the call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 October 2020. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form.

Renaming from “OBF Travel Fellowship” to “OBF Event Fellowship”

One of the goals of the OBF fellowship is to increase the participation of members from traditionally underrepresented groups at events or communities that promote Open Source software development and/or open science practices in the biological sciences. Since so many scientific meetings have been or are now run online, and we wish to explicitly support remote participation for this year, we are renaming ‘OBF Travel Fellowship’ to ‘OBF Event Fellowship’.

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Getting introduced to Bioinformatics and Open Science through BCC 2020

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. Gigi Kenneth, a biochemistry undergrad and a bioinformatics enthusiast from Nigeria, was supported to participate in Bioinformatics Community Conference 2020 by this fellowship granted to her in the application round-1 of 2020. Find more information here.

I’m a biochemistry undergraduate, in my final year from the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. I started learning about artificial intelligence and machine learning last year (2019), which I found really interesting and was really amazed by its applications in various fields. I found myself wondering about how these related to my graduate program, so I did some digging and was awed by the incredible work being done in this field.

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A Software Engineer's Experience at BCC 2020

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. Edidiong Etuk (Eddie), an open-source lover and a software engineer from Nigeria, was supported to take part in Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2020 by this fellowship granted to him in the application round-1 of 2020. Find more information here.

TL;DR This post is about my experience at Bioinformatics Community Conference 2020.

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