nodalpoint.org

Not long ago I thought that conference travel was a perk of the trade, and helped compensate for the academic salary and lack of six-figure bonuses. This was despite the fact that I have been a leftie/green for as long as I can remember. Denial works in mysterious ways. Now I have read Six degrees by Mark Lynas and see airport expansion potentially going crazy in London - and I think maybe all this conference travel can be reduced.

I've recently been to a cool workshop called "RegCreative". The idea was to mass-curate papers into a new database. There we have the usual discussion "open" (Oreganno) versus "private" (Transfac) databases and the open one is this case is still far from big enough, but that's not my main point here.
I liked the workshop because we were actually spending a lot of time at the computer and reading papers. There were no big stars, impressive results, great publications and hypothesizes, mainly people that presented their own databases ("I've spent 500 hours to create my database" (flytf), "I read 120 papers) (flyreg), etc...) and then afterwards everyone would get back to their computers, trying to put in one of the papers from the big pile at the entrace. The problem of database curation became very obvious to all participants and they got more tired of reading papers with every day that passed... (Here is a picture from the beginning, when people were still discussing :-)

Finally after three weeks of recovery, I give you my write up of the Noalpoint European Tour. I had a great time in The Netherlands at Advances in Microarray Technology, visiting the Sanger Center in Cambridge and I also had the opportunity to catch up with Alf Eaton and Euan from postgenomic over a few pints in London.

One of the few fringe benefits of doing science is travel. And to that end I bring you the Nodalpoint European Tour. I am currently in Amsterdam and will be here until November the 5th. The official reason is attending the Advances in Microarray Technology meeting, and I have just completed day one. The conference seems to be more industry focused, appropriately so, as I am here courtesy of work. I don't know if I'll have the opportunity to blog the talks, there is no free internet access at the conference, and their media policy does seem to mention blogging (I doubt they have even considered it). When I asked about internet access I was meet with blank stares ? The hotel is charging 22 Euro per day for access, and that is consecutive hours. So I don't know if I'll make the Bio::Blogs deadline (see bellow), but anything related to conference blogging is my pick for this month.

It's been 3 years since I made it to a meeting - that was ISMB 2003, here in Brisbane. Next week I'll be attending ComBio2006...here in Brisbane. Ah well.

The "com" in ComBio is "combined" rather than "computational" - it's a large conference for a number of Australian/New Zealand life science societies. There are 10 streams including several of interest to Nodalpointers, especially bioinformatics/systems biology, gene expression/regulation and protein structure/function. I'll do my best to blog any interesting stuff here and at my place, possibly "live" depending on the facilities.

update: the blogging is at my place and it ain't live thanks to the (non) facilities.

What do you do before leaving for a conference in another (OECD) country? I have some geekish ideas, but could need more: Have a look at Craig's list to see what to do after the conference is finished, download a hotspot locator (The first one I found was Jiwire), check out TripAdvisor, get a calling card and a telephone cable to use your modem if there are not enough hotspots. Maybe buy a thing like a Lonely Planet. Download some papers to read on the airplane. Unfortunately google earth is not usable offline. Any other ideas?

The 3rd International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences 2006 (DILS'06) have just opened their call for papers. Deadline for abstracts is the 2nd March 2006 and the conference this year will be held at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK.

The American Association of Artificial Intelligence have a special "Semantic Web" track of technical conference papers at AAAI-06, the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, Boston, 16-20 July 2006. Abstracts need to be submitted by the 16th February, see the AAAI: Call for Papers.

The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) is the leading European and one of the primary international conferences in computational biology and bioinformatics. The fifth meeting in this series will be held on September 10-13, 2006 in the resort town of Eilat, Israel. The meeting will be held jointly with the 9th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium. The Deadline for paper submissions is 15th March 2006.

The German Conference on Bioinformatics is presently underway. Spitshine is in attendance and also blogging the conference. First day included highlights such as the "RNA mafia" and speculation on the significance of the "air metagenome" (for biodefence of course). Interesting stuff.