Bosc

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.

After much discussion, the BCC2020 organizing committee has decided to hold the meeting on Remo.co, which is similar to Zoom but offers a more conference-like experience, with “floors” and “tables” where you can mingle with other attendees. It has great small group and presentation support, including for posters and demos. It’s also more fun than most online conference platforms.

Because Remo is not familiar to most BCC participants, we are holding two open houses, one in each hemisphere, the day before BCC training starts. These walk-throughs will introduce participants to Remo’s features and demonstrate how to navigate between sessions, poster/demos, BoFs, training and everything else.

We’re old hands at organizing in-person BOSC s (some of us were involved in planning the very first BOSC, in 2000), but this is the first time we’re attempting an online conference, and we want your help to make BCC2020 a rewarding experience for all.

We know many of you have attended other virtual conferences recently, and we’re interested in hearing what worked well and what didn’t. In particular, we are trying to figure out how to make virtual posters work, and how to run Q&A (with audio, or just typed? live, right after the talks, or asynchronous?). We’re also interested in ideas for adding fun social elements to what could otherwise be a pretty dull extended videoconference.

We look forward to receiving lots of abstracts by the end of this week from people interested in presenting at the online Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020), which combines the Galaxy Community Conference, and our own Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC). The BCC2020 abstract submission deadline is Friday 8 May 2020.

Some of the recent round of the OBF Travel Fellowships will be supporting BCC2020 attendees with video conferencing costs (headsets, web-cameras, etc), full announcement coming soon.

The 2020 Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020), which brings together the BOSC and Galaxy communities, will take place online–more info here.

The online meeting will still be held July 18-21. Registration will open in a few weeks, and fees will be lower than for an in-person meeting. Abstract submission will open soon and will close April 30th. We will follow the usual submission and review processes.

We are discussing how to arrange the schedule to allow for participation across the globe. We welcome your input on how to make our first Virtual Bioinformatics Community Conference a success.

This is a guest blog post from Aziz Khan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the ISMB/ECCB and BOSC 2019 meeting in Basel, July 2019. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Find more information here.

Computational tools and software are now becoming the core of scientific discovery, and making it open source and sharing it freely with the community helps to take scientific discoveries to the next level. We live in an era where international and interdisciplinary collaborations become very central to answer big scientific questions. Given science is becoming more collaborative and data-intensive, we need intelligent and robust computational algorithms to help us to understand and interpret such big-data.

If you’d like the opportunity to present your work at BOSC 2019 (which will take place in Basel, Switzerland, on July 24-25, the last two days of ISMB/ECCB 2019), now’s your chance! The late round of abstract submission is open, and we will be choosing a few abstracts for “Late-Breaking Lightning Talks” as well as posters.

BOSC welcomes submissions about all aspects of open source bioinformatics, open science and open data. More information, and a link to the EasyChair submission portal, can be found at /events/bosc/submit/ .

This is a guest blog post from Tendai Mutangadura, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the GCCBOSC 2018 meeting in Portland, June 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. This was one of three awards from our April 2018 travel fellowships call. Our August call recently closed, the current call closes 15 December 2018, you might want to apply?

How should I start describing the fruitful experience in this amazing city… First time ever in Portland, second time attending BOSC… I knew I was signing up for a great time but did not know much about the uncanny beauty of this picturesque city.

First of all, I would like to thank the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) for providing partial funding to support my travel expenses (though an OBF Travel Fellowship award). I would also like to thank my PhD supervisors Andrew Lonie and Richard O. Sinnott for the remaining expenditure.

BOSC 2019 will be part of ISMB 2019 Every year until 2018, BOSC was part of the annual ISMB conference as a community of special interest (COSI, formerly known as a SIG, Special Interest Group). As part of our continuing quest to broaden and deepen the BOSC community, we decided to perform an experiment this year by partnering with the Galaxy Community Conference rather than with ISMB. As we reported, the experiment was a success–participants were overwhelmingly positive about the experience, and the conference did attract a somewhat different mix of attendees than in past years. However, we also concluded that there are some advantages to meeting with ISMB–for example, it attracts more students and postdocs, and the presence of other COSI tracks provides a wider range of scientific topics. Moreover, unlike the GCC 2018 venue, the venue already chosen for GCC 2019 has a number of drawbacks: we wouldn’t be able to run similarly-sized parallel sessions; registration prices wouldn’t be as affordable as in 2018; and the venue would not be able to accommodate the larger (160 people) and longer (four days) CollaborationFest that was one of the highlights of GCCBOSC 2018.For these and other reasons, the BOSC organizing committee concluded that the best way to serve the broadest community of potential BOSC attendees will be to partner with ISMB some years and GCC some years. We therefore plan to hold BOSC 2019 in Basel as part of ISMB. We hope to partner with GCC in 2020 at a North American site to be determined, or in 2021 in Europe.Wherever we hold future BOSCs, you can be sure that they will include a wide range of topics in open science and open source bioinformatics, and we hope that they will draw an ever-diversifying mix of attendees. As always, we welcome your feedback about what you liked in past BOSCs and your suggestions for the future. Feel free to email us ( bosc@open-bio.org) or tweet (@OBF_BOSC).