Bosc

This year, the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) and the Bioinformatics Community Conference (BOSC) met together to form the first Bioinformatics Community Conference. At GCCBOSC 2018, participants were able to meet and collaborate with a broad community of bioinformatics developers and users who focus on open, interoperable software tools and libraries that facilitate scientific research.

Held in June 2018 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, GCCBOSC attracted nearly 300 participants from around the world. The meeting started with two days of training workshops (Figure 1). The main meeting had some parallel sessions and some joint sessions, including well-received keynote talks by Tracy Teal, Fernando Pérez and Lucia Peixoto, as well as a panel discussion about documentation and training. Posters, demos and Birds of a Feather sessions ( BoFs) gave participants opportunities to engage in discussions about topics of mutual interest. After the main meeting, many attendees stayed for up to four additional collaboration days (the CollaborationFest, or CoFest). Figure 1. Participants at one of the GCCBOSC training workshops. (All GCCBOSC photographs in this post are from Bérénice Batut’s Flickr album, under a CC-BY-SA license.) Figures 2,3. Attendees and presenters mingled at the poster/demo sessions.

It was really great to meet so many of you at GCCBOSC this year! We will soon have a couple of Travel Fellowship blog posts talking about the conference, so we won’t provide too much of a general overview at this point, but we would like to share a little more about one of the Bird of Feather (BoF) events we ran - specifically the OBF community BoF. The aim of this BoF was to engage anyone who was:

We had another great round of applications for the OBF Travel Fellowship this spring. After reviewing the applications, the OBF Board selected three recipients, who have all accepted the award.

Congratulations to our spring 2018 recipients:

• Anisha Keshavan –  attended the eLife Innovation Sprint. Anisha is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, where she develops open source code, including citizen scientist platforms for image quality classification and image segmentation ( update - see blog post).
• Farah Zaib Khan – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Farah is a Common Workflow Language contributor based at the University of Melbourne. She has recently been working on a project to record the provenance of CWL workflows, and first attended BOSC in 2017 ( update - see blog post).
• Tendai Mutangadura – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Tendai is a first-time BOSC attendee who works at the University of Missouri and focuses on studying disease-causing mutations in canine genomics ( update - see blog post).

Watch this space for blog posts from each of the awardees ( update - links added above).

We are pleased to announce that abstract submission and early registration for GCCBOSC2018 are now open. This event brings our annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference and the Galaxy Community Conference together into a unified week-long event. If you work in open source life science or data-intensive biomedical research, then there is no better place than GCCBOSC 2018 to present your work and to learn from others.

BOSC 2017 ( /wiki/BOSC_2017) was held in Prague in July 2017 as part of the annual ISMB conference. Nearly 250 people, half of whom were first-time attendees, participated in the meeting. Over 50 talks and a similar number of posters covered topics ranging from workflow tools to a crowd-funded “tree of beers.” This year’s Open Data theme was reflected in the keynote talks by Madeleine Ball and Nick Loman and the panel discussion about the opportunities and challenges of open data.

We had a huge response to this round of the OBF travel award. After reviewing the applications, the OBF board selected four recipients. Three applicants accepted awards, and all plan to use the funds to attend this year’s BOSC, to take place July 22-23 in Prague.

Congratulations to our spring 2017 recipients:

• Sourav Singh, who will participate in the Codefest and present the Biopython Project Update 2017 talk
• Jonathan Sobel, presenting on a citizen science project named BeerDeCoded, carried out by members of the Swiss non-profit called the Hackuarium
• Jiwen Xin, presenting the BioThings Explorer project, which integrates genomic data via public APIs

We encourage everyone at BOSC to come out and support our award winners! After BOSC, watch for blog posts from each of the awardees.

We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2017, and our first sponsors.

But first a final reminder - today (Thursday 13 April 2017) is our deadline for submitting a full length talk abstract to BOSC 2017.

Dawn Field

Dawn Field is a Lamberg International Guest Professor at Göteborg University’s Department of Marine Sciences. Previously she was a senior research fellow at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Head of the Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, UK, and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. She is also a founder of the Genomic Standards Consortium, the Genomic Observatories Network and Ocean Sampling Day.

First I would like to congratulate OBF that supports diversity in the community with its travel awards initiative. I was very pleased to be one of the three travel fellowship awardees. Thank you OBF! Ιt was great to attend BOSC 2016 and meet remarkable people and know their work.It was one of the most welcoming meetings I have attended and Ι liked that is was active on the social media and the conference materials and speaker presentations were available online. It made it fun and useful and we could focus less on our notebooks and more on the speakers. Τhis also attracted a lot of positive comments from the other Special Interest Groups. So “Bravo” to the organizers!On the scientific part, it was nice to see Docker making an impression on the bioinformatics community. Everyone was talking about it. It is an awesome way to package bioinformatics applications and the fact that it received so much attention got me pretty excited. I am planning to use it to package CollOS, an open source web application I presented at the conference, that tracks, annotates and barcodes biological samples to facilitate wet lab scientists to locate and identify biological samples.Last but definitely not least, I would like to congratulate Mónica Muñoz-Torres and the organizers for their reference to the recent tragic shooting incident in Orlando.Hope to see you next year in Prague!Dimitra