Bosc

Going home after attending BOSC was a little bittersweet. It’s my favorite conference because it brings together such a welcoming group of people, and the lineup of talks typically offers a great balance of technical learning and community-building insights. So on my flight home, I was coasting on dopamine from the good times, but also getting a little sad that it was over for this year. With the help of a few fellow BOSC enthusiasts (special shout-out to Nomi Harris for the event summary notes, photos and help recruiting contributors), I put together this little recap of the conference, with highlights and personal accounts contributed by a number of other participants. I couldn’t fit everything people shared into the blog post, but you can find the full quotes in the original google doc.

We are excited to announce that BOSC and Bio-Ontologies will join forces for part of a day at ISMB 2022. The joint session will include talks chosen from abstracts submitted to BOSC or Bio-Ontologies, plus a keynote speaker who is well known in both the ontology and open science communities!

BOSC and Bio-Ontologies are two of the longest-running COSIs (Communities of Special Interest) at ISMB: BOSC started in 2000 and Bio-Ontologies in 1998. Bio-Ontologies focuses on the FAIR development and application of ontologies and other Linked Open Data resources and the organization and dissemination of knowledge in biomedicine and the life sciences; BOSC covers the full spectrum of open source, open science, open data and open standards in the life sciences.

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 announced today that the conference will be virtual. This news may be disappointing to some, but for others it offers an opportunity to participate in a conference that they would not have been able to travel to attend.

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/ .