Thoughts on this year's ISMB/ECCB?
Chris Cole
Friday, 03 August 2007 10:07 UTC
Did anyone here go to ISMB in Vienna or the SIGs?
I only went to the 3DSig
Overall it was quite interesting, but not enough variety. Too much time was devoted to protein-ligand interactions with some of the findings being far from startling.
The discussions were a good addition, but needed to be more focused rather than just have hand-wavey musings by some PIs.
The posters were much more varied in topic, but of course the ones I wanted to see were on the same day as mine so I couldn’t spend enough time viewing them!
BTW Vienna is great city!
Anyone else?
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Replies
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I thought it was better than the past ones that I had been to. The changes to allow non-full length papers submitted and more recent topics from the highlight track was a good addition. I made a few points about the conference here and some reflections on the open data and software BoF
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Thanks for your reply, Jason.
Your comments on your blogs are interesting and Carole Goble’s talk certainly raises some pertinent points. I think we’re all guilty of some Bioinformatic sins!
It is interesting that Open Source had it’s own BoF session as at the 3Dsig there was an option to talk about OSS in one of the discussions, but no-one seemed interested. Which is a shame IMO. For me science is all about sharing ideas and discoveries, and software/code should be part and parcel of that ideal. It seems completely backward that a group spends several years of effort and public money only to hide their ‘results’ away from the community.
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I guess it has to do with timing. The open data and software BoF was organized by ISCB during ISMB conference to address their policy statement. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware of what 3Dsig was doing or their BoFs so it was hard to attend. I think better coordination among the SIGs in the future is necessary as there is much overlap among them.
BOSC has always been a conference focused on open source software but the sessions are more on the code and less on the politics We all (for the most part) already agree that software should be freely available and the conference is a chance to showcase and explain implementation detail or applications and uses.
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“I think better coordination among the SIGs in the future is necessary as there is much overlap among them.”
Definitely! If you signed up for one SIG you had no idea what was going on in the others. From I could see from the full schedules is that there was a lot of overlap between 3Dsig and Automated Function Prediction – I’m not sure I went to the right one this year :-/
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