Archive for February, 2015

VIZBI 2015 Deadlines

Saturday, February 28th, 2015

A few brief updates on VIZBI 2015, which is now only a few weeks away:

Poster submissions. March 7 is the new deadline for uploading posters for normal participants.

‘Virtual’ poster submissions. March 15 is the deadline for upload of posters for remote participants.

Art of Biology submissions. March 15 is also the deadline for Art & Biology submissions.

Tutorial registration. March 15 is also the deadline for registering for tutorials. Spaces are limited so register soon via http://vizbi.org/2015/registration.

Conference registration. March 15 is also the conference registration deadline, so please take note if you are planning to attend but have not yet registered.

2014 Visualization Challenge winners

Friday, February 27th, 2015

Winners of the 2014 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge have just been announced. In total, 10 outstanding entries were announced as either winners or honorable mentions in 5 categories (Photography, Illustration, Posters & Graphics, Games & Apps, or Video). To see all 10 winning entries, click here.

VIZBI 2015 Autodesk Award for Best Art & Biology Poster

Tuesday, February 24th, 2015

Great news for the artistically inclined: Autodesk have again offered a full Maya license as a prize for the best Art & Biology poster at VIZBI 2015. Normally retailing for $3,675, Maya is widely used for creating interactive 3D applications, video games, animated film, TV series, and visual effects. This very generous prize is offered to participants from academia and industry alike, but cannot be resold.

Each conference participant can upload one artistically-inspired Art & Biology image with accompanying text. The deadline for entering has been extended to 23:59 PST on 15 March 2015. These images will first be revealed during a special event as part of the Art & Biology evening. The award for best Art & Biology submission will be decided by popular vote and announced at the Awards Ceremony during the VIZBI 2015 closing session. Participants are asked to vote for their favourite Art & Biology submission based on how visually compelling and original it is; it may help to see Art & Biology submissions from previous VIZBI meetings. Further details on submission and upload are here.

So, if you’re still waiting for another reason to register for VIZBI, here it is: submit an Art & Biology poster and win a Maya license!

BioVis 2015 challenges

Wednesday, February 18th, 2015

This year’s BioVis contests center around RNA. The Design challenge poses the question of how to best represent RNA structural uncertainty and evolution. The Data Analysis challenge asks whether you can figure out the structural, or other physical properties that predispose some individuals towards disease, or health.  For more information, see the BioVis challenge video and visit the BioVis website. The submission deadline is May 1st, 2015. BioVis 2015 will be held as part of ISMB 2015 in Dublin, Ireland.

BioVis 2015 paper submission closes Feb. 15

Wednesday, February 11th, 2015

The paper deadline for BioVis 2015 (http://biovis.net/, July 10-11) – the 5th Symposium on Biological Data Visualization – closes soon. Original contributions are invited on all aspects of visualization in biology, from molecular to cell, tissue, organism and population biology. In addition to full scientific papers, BioVis also invites scientific posters, participation in a data contest, or in a design contest. BioVis 2015 brings together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and engaging visualization researchers in problems in biological data visualization as well as bioinformatics and biology researchers in state-of-the-art visualization research. It will be co-located with the ISMB/ECCB conference in Dublin, Ireland.

VIZBI 2015 Tutorial Day

Saturday, February 7th, 2015

The early bird registration for VIZBI is closing after today, 7th of February 2015. Have you decided which two from the twelve tutorials you’ll sign up for this year? Below is a brief reminder of what’s on offer.

MORNING SESSIONS

In the morning session of the VIZBI 2015 tutorial day you can choose from the following six tutorials:

Terri Gilbert’s
Engaging with the Allen Brain Atlas resources

Terri Gilbert’s Engaging with the Allen Brain Atlas resources

Gael McGill’s
Crafting dynamic molecular animations
with Molecular Maya & Clarafi.com

Gael McGill’s Crafting dynamic molecular animations with Molecular Maya & Clarafi.com

Keiichiro Ono’s
Network visualization and analysis workflows with Cytoscape

AFTERNOON SESSIONS

Among the afternoon’s six offerings you can find single tool/group tutorials as well as three thematic tutorials, which combine tools developed by different groups. Like above, clicking on each title will take you to the tutorial description on the program page.

Genomes in 3D Juicebox, TADKit and Genome3D
Neva C. Durand, Jim Robinson, Mike Goodstadt, Marc A. Marti-Renom, Jim Zheng and Jijun Tang
Genomes in 3D Juicebox, TADKit and Genome3D Genomes in 3D Juicebox, TADKit and Genome3D

Reuse, develop and share biological visualisation with BioJS
Manuel Corpas, Tatyana Goldberg, Guy Yachdav, Sebastian Wilzbach and David Dao
Reuse, develop and share biological visualisation with BioJS

Spatially realistic single-cell models from high-content microscopy data
Jacob Czech, Greg Johnson, Bálint Antal and José Juan Tapia
Spatially realistic single-cell models from high-content microscopy data Spatially realistic single-cell models from high-content microscopy data

Spatially realistic single-cell models from high-content microscopy data

Garuda – The way biology connects
Samik Ghosh, Hiroaki Kitano and Yukiko Matsuoka
Garuda - The way biology connects

Changes to the VIZBI 2015 Tutorial lineup

Friday, February 6th, 2015

We’ve had a couple of changes to the program since the first announcement of the tutorials available on the VIZBI 2015 tutorial day (Tuesday 25th March).

The two changes are in the afternoon session: Unfortunately, the IGB tutorial due to be given by Ann Loraine will not now take place, so sorry to disappoint if you were looking forward to getting into some in-depth discussion with the creators of that great tool. Jeremy Goecks and the other Galaxy folk have also had to pull out from the joint tutorial on employing galaxy, Ginkgo and UCSC Xena for single cell sequencing and functional genomics.

Stay tuned for some more details about the tutorials, and see the VIZBI 2015 program for full descriptions.

PhenoPlot: visualization of cellular imaging data

Thursday, February 5th, 2015

PhenoPlot – a tool for visualizing cellular imaging data that won Best Scientific Poster Award at VIZBI 2014 – has recently been published in Nature Communications by Heba Sailem and colleagues. PhenoPLot is an open source Matlab toolbox and GUI that enables intuitive visualization of multidimensional data from thousands of cellular images. It uses a flexible, glyph-based approach to visually depict up to 21 variables that characterize cellular structure. The concepts employed in Phenoplot can be extended to many other phenotypic datasets such as those describing tissues, or organisms such as worm or zebrafish. PhenoPlot can also be used for science communication and outreach.

Two stunning new biomedical animations

Wednesday, February 4th, 2015

Today (Feb. 4) at 4:30pm Canberra time you can join a live video steam covering the premiere screening of two stunning new biomedical animations from Maja Divjak and Chris Hammang – both trained by world-renowned animator Drew Berry. The event will be opened by Iann Chubb, Australia’s Chief Scientist. After the event, a recording of the event and the animations will be on YouTube. Details at http://vizbi.org/plus/events/. After the event, the animations are available at http://vizbi.org/plus/.

Webinar today on Aquaria

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015

Aquaria is a web resource for biologists that simplifies the process of gaining insight from protein structures. To coincide with the publication of Aquaria in this month’s Nature Methods by O’Donoghue and co-workers, the Aquaria team are hosting a webinar today that shows how it can be used to gain insight into protein function. Details at http://aquaria.ws/launch. Aquaria will also be at VIZBI 2015 as part of a combined tutorial on 3D structures with the Chimera team.