VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA VIZBI

The 2013 posters are at http://vizbi.org/Posters/2013. For the Wednesday 6pm Breakout session, participants can propose and vote for topics at http://bit.ly/vizbi2013breakouts (you’ll need to log in with a Google ID). For Twitter please use the ‘#vizbi’ hashtag; we encourage participants to upload photos from VIZBI to Flickr and use the tag ‘vizbi’ – they will appear at http://vizbi.org/2013/Photos/.

A heads-up that conference registration and one-day registration will close Sunday, 17 March, at 11:59 pm EST. However, registration for virtual participation will remain open throughout the meeting.

Autodesk have offered a free Maya license for the best Art & Biology poster at VIZBI 2013. 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 academics and industry alike, but cannot be resold.

Each participant can upload one scientific poster and one artistically-inspired ’Art & Biology’ poster. The award for best poster in each category will be decided by popular vote. Participants are asked to judge scientific posters based on how well they communicate work of significant biological insight or importance; the best scientific poster will be awarded the NVIDIA prize. By contrast, the criteria for assessing Art & Biology posters are subjective, so the Autodesk Award will likely go to a poster that is visually compelling and original – it may help to see Art & Biology posters from previous VIZBI meetings. Further details on poster submission and upload are here.

To allow extra time for submissions for this award, we have extended the deadline for upload of Art & Biology posters only until midnight PST, March 17 .

NVIDIA have just confirmed they will again sponsor a very attractive prize for the best poster at VIZBI 2013: their high-end Quadro K5000 professional video card, retailing for US$2,199. One of the world’s fastest GPUs, this card is designed for large-scale visualization of complex data; it supports up to four displays, has 1,536 CUDA Cores, 4GB of GDDR5 memory, a single-precision performance of 2.1 Teraflops, and the ability to render 1.8 billion triangles per second. Such performance allows real-time rendering of stunning photorealistic, interactive 3D scenes. We have extended the deadline for poster upload until midnight PST, March 14 . In addition to scientific posters, each participant can also upload an artistically-inspired ‘Art & Biology’ poster (see here for more details). The award for best poster will be decided by popular vote.

Drew Berry is a cell biologist and biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia. He is best known for creating scientifically accurate and visually stunning biological animations that shed light on cellular and molecular processes and enlighten both researchers and the scientifically curious. His work has earned him international recognition including an Emmy (2005) and a BAFTA (2004). In 2010 he was awarded a Macarthur Fellowship. Drew Berry’s animations have been exhibited at such prestigious venues as MoMA and the Guggenheim. More recently, he has won widespread acclaim for his work on the video clip for Björk’s track “Hollow” from her app-based Biophilia album. He was a VIZBI 2011 keynote speaker and this year he will be running a tutorial on how he uses key features of Maya software to produce stunning animations. His VIZBI 2011 keynote address can be viewed here.

Poster upload for VIZBI 2013 is now open – to upload a poster, you need to first register for the VIZBI conference, and you will receive details on the upload process with your confirmation email. To be included in the VIZBI conference, your contribution needs to be uploaded on or before 12 March 2013.

We have also finalized the VIZBI 2013 tutorial program; each tutorial now has a brief description, with links to further details. We have been fortunate to get some very high profile tutors.

Winners of the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge have just been announced. In total, 15 outstanding entries were announced as either winners or honorable mentions in 5 categories (Photography, Illustration, Posters & Graphics, Games & Apps, or Video). The four featured below are (from left to right): a photograph of the microscopic crystals that make up a sea urchin’s tooth (Gilbert & Killian; U. Wisconsin); CT scans that reveal the shell structure of a clam and a whelk (Fung, Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital, Hong Kong); a side-by-side comparison of X-ray and traditional microscope images of several fruits, each containing a tiny seed (Sykora et al., Charles U.); a video showing stunning images of coral symbiomes obtained using laser scanning confocal microscopy (Farrar et al., U. Hawaii). To see all 15 winning entries, click here.

A short reminder that early registration for VIZBI 2013 closes this Friday, Feb 8. Space is limited so register soon to ensure a place.

This year’s program focuses on new and emerging fields, and features contributions from some very high profile scientists, both for the 21 invited talks, as well as the 12 tutorials on March 19, one day prior to the conference.

If you are interesting in promoting your organization or professional society, a range of sponsorship options are also available.

If you cannot join us in Cambridge, USA, you have the option of virtual registration, which allows participation via streaming video and chat. At VIZBI 2013, for the first time, virtual participants can now submit a poster along with a 60 second video presentation, which will be screened during one of the fast-forward sessions (details here).

Early registration for VIZBI 2013 is open until February 8, 2013 – after then, an additional registration charge of $100 will be added for all participants. Poster upload closes March 12, 2013.

Indiana University is offering a free MOOC (massive open online course) in Information Visualization, starting Jan 22, 2013 – for details see http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu.

We are pleased to announce VIZBI 2013, the 4th international meeting on ‘Visualizing Biological Data’ to be held at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge MA (USA), March 20-22. VIZBI 2013 brings together scientists actively using or developing computational visualization to study a diverse range of biological data; the conference also encourages participation from medical illustrators, graphic designers, and graphic artists.

VIZBI 2013 features 21 invited talks from high-profile speakers that will review the state-of-the-art and challenges in visualizing data from genomes, transcripts, proteins, cell biology, organisms, and populations. Prior to the meeting (March 19), there will also be tutorials on visualization tools & methods. All VIZBI participants have the opportunity to present a poster describing their work. Just before your poster session, you will be given ~60 seconds and 2 PowerPoint slides to briefly introduce yourself and your poster to all VIZBI participants (details here). If you cannot join us in Cambridge, USA, you have the option of virtual registration, which allows participation via streaming video and chat. The first three VIZBI meetings have been very lively events, and have helped fostered a new focus on data visualization in the life sciences – videos of previous meeting are available at http://vizbi.org/videos. VIZBI 2013 will have a special focus on data from research methods that are new, but rapidly emerging – we hope you can join us for this exciting event!

Last chance to publish your paper on biodata visualisation at ECCB 2012: in case you missed the March 30 deadline for paper submission, the organisers announced they have extended the deadline to Sunday April 8, 2012 (midnight GMT). For details, see http://www.eccb12.org/proceedings.

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.