VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA VIZBI

Another key bioinformatics meeting has created a paper track specifically for biodata vis & imaging papers. The European Conference on Computational Biology is the key European computational biology event in 2012, taking place 9-12 September 2012 in Basel, Switzerland. This year, ECCB specifically invites papers on biodata visualisation – the deadline for papers is 30 March 2012.

At VIZBI 2012 last week, the NVIDIA award for best poster was decided by popular vote; the winning poster was D18 – uPy: a ubiquitous Python API with biological modeling applications enables ePMV & autoFill by Ludovic Autin, Graham Johnson, Johan Hake, Arthur Olson, Michel Sanner from Scripps & USCF, California, USA. uPy provides a Python interface that lets users drive several computer graphics programs (Blender, Maya, Cinema4D, DejaVu) as well as two Graphical User Interface toolkits (Tkinter and Qt). The uPy group received an NVIDIA Quadro 6000 professional video card, one of the world’s fastest GPUs. Congratulations!

As the current VIZBI web server has become slow and has had recent crashes, we have been preparing to transfer the site to a new, much faster server. The new server still has minor glitches but is close to fully functional: the speed-up is particularly useful to navigating the VIZBI posters. Thus, we have decided to make it available as a back-up server during VIZBI 2012 under a temporary URL (http://bioviz.info/). Many thanks Jean-Karim Hériché and Venkata Satagopam!

VIZBI 2012 posters are now online at http://vizbi.org/Posters/2012; the collection of 75 images and abstracts can be navigated graphically (via image thumbnails), browsed by author or title (via list view), or searched by full text (via VIZBI site search). To help explore these high-resolution images, we made them easily zoomable in any browser using Seadragon Ajax (uses Javascript only, no plugins needed). I believe that in the near future zoomable, high-resolution images will become indispensible in science and beyond; the VIZBI zoomable poster collection can be a showcase, highlighting how this technology can benefit scientific meetings and scientific communication. Many thanks to everyone who contributed, especially Jim Procter & Sven Haag.