Gccbosc

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.

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 Open Bioinformatics Foundation was shocked and saddened to learn that our colleague and collaborator James Taylor, a professor of biology and computer science at Johns Hopkins University, died on April 2, 2020. James was one of the creators and PIs of the Galaxy Project, which is among the most widely used platforms in open bioinformatics. The Galaxy community has created a tribute page for James.

We have close ties to James and the Galaxy project via our flagship conference. BOSC, which was first held in partnership with the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) in 2018, will again be co-hosted with GCC at the online Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020) this July.

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 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).

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.