VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA VIZBI

Illumina have announced the iDEA Conference (June 14–15, 2011, San Diego), where finalists in the iDEA Challenge will present their approaches to analyzing, visualizing, and interpreting next-generation sequencing data. The iDEA Conference is open to anyone interested in methods for understanding data produced by next-generation sequencing and high-density array studies. The iDEA Challenge winners will be announced at the conference.

The image below summarizes the feedback received from VIZBI participants. Many thanks to everyone that submitted feedback, especially those who took time to give specific suggestions for improvement. Overall, the feedback is clearly very positive and quite consistent across both VIZBI meetings so far, indicating that the VIZBI format addresses an important and largely unmet need. On behalf of the VIZBI organizers, I would like to thank again the speakers, session chairs, poster presenters, tutors, and all who contributed to making VIZBI 2011 a very exciting and engaging meeting. We hope you can join us for VIZBI 2012 (March 6-8) at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, or again in 2013, when VIZBI returns to the Broad in Cambridge, MA, USA.

We are delighted to announce the call for participation for the 1st IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization (BioVis 2011), 23-24 October 2011 in Providence, RI, USA, which will be co-located with IEEE VisWeek 2011. BioVis is designed to appeal to all interested in biological data visualization, and especially for researchers in computer science, bioinformatics, and biology who are involved in the design, implementation, application, and evaluation of novel visualization techniques and interested in the theoretical foundations underlying these topics. It features a full paper track, in which the best submissions are presented as talks and published as part of the meeting proceedings. BioVis is planned to complement the VIZBI meetings, which lack a paper track, and are instead organized in a format more typical for biology conferences. Whereas VIZBI aims to review current visualization methods, tools, and challenges in biology, BioVis aims to present novel approaches to these challenges. The VIZBI and BioVis organizers plan to actively encourage an ongoing dialog and exchange between the two meetings, e.g., by sharing invited speakers. The deadline for paper submission is 30 April 2011, and for abstracts is 8 July 2011.

The VIZBI 2011 posters can now be browsed visually via thumbnails at:  http://vizbi.org/2011/Posters.

There are already around 40 photos from VIZBI 2011 on flickr. If you have  additional photos of VIZBI 2011, we encourage you to put them up on flickr and tag them with both ‘VIZBI’ and ‘VIZBI2011′. Some examples:

Last week, the online publication Bioinform from GenomeWeb released a 850-word article about VIZBI 2011. A subscription is required to access the full article.

The winner of the VIZBI 2011 poster prize goes to Jörg Bernhardt (E.M.A.-University Greifswald, Germany) for his poster titled ‘OntologyMaps’, co-authored with Henry Mehlan, Julia Schüler, and Michael Hecker – congratulations Jörg!

A quick heads-up: the early registration for VIZBI 2011 closes next Monday (Jan 31) – after this date, registration costs $100 more.

The New York Times website recently posted a video titled ‘The Animators of Life‘, about recent work by scientists and animators in creating vivid depictions of molecular processes occurring inside living cells. The New York Times video features work by Drew Berry, and relates to work by Gaël McGill, both speakers at VIZBI 2011.

Registration is now open for VIZBI 2011 at http://vizbi.org/2011/Registration/. Due to the venue size, we are strictly limited to a maximum of 250 participants. Book early to ensure your place, and to take advantage of the early registration fee.

We are delighted to announce VIZBI 2011, the 2nd workshop on ‘Visualizing Biological Data’, to be held at the Broad Institute, Cambridge-MA (USA), March 16-18, 2011. VIZBI 2011 brings together scientists actively using or developing computational visualization to study a diverse range of biological data. The workshop features an impressive list of high-profile speakers who will each review the state-of-the-art and challenges with visualization in their field. VIZBI 2011 also features an art and science evening (Thursday) during which we will be joined by medical illustrators, graphic designers, and artists interested in biological visualization. On Saturday, March 20, immediately after the workshop, participants can choose from a range of tutorials and take part in a hands-on ‘bring-your-own-data’ session. All workshop participants are encouraged to submit a poster on their work, plus an image for the art & science evening. Participants also have the opportunity to be part of an authoritative book co-authored with the VIZBI speakers; the book will be the first to comprehensively review this topic – essentially an expanded version of the Nature Methods focus issue – and will be distributed by a major scientific publisher. We hope you can join us for this exciting event!

The VIZBI 2011 chairs
Seán O’Donoghue, EMBL
James Procter, U. Dundee
Larry Hunter, U. Colorado
Bang Wong, Broad

The company Illumina recently announced their ‘iDEA challenge’ to recognize new, creative ideas on how to visualize and analyze genomics data. Entries are due March 15, 2011 and the winners will be announced June 15, 2011. The  winning academic entry will be awarded US$50,000, while the winning  commercial entry will be awarded a co-marketing agreement with Illumina. Seperate prizes will also be awarded for the most creative visualization, and most creative algorithm. If you are working on visualizing genome data, it sounds like a great opportunity to achieve recognition.

Drew Berry, a VIZBI 2011 keynote speaker, has been awarded a MacArthur Fellow. He  is a animator who uses scientifically accurate and aesthetically rich visualizations to elucidate cellular and molecular processes for a wide range of audiences. A video about the award is available here that includes an interview with Dr Berry, and features some of his work.

A Workshop on Recent Advances and Future Prospects for Visualizing Macromolecular Complexes and Cellular Structures is planned for Oct 12-13 at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Invitations to submit abstracts are now open – for more details, see https://respond.niaid.nih.gov/conferences/

David Leader –  one of the participants in VIZBI 2010 – wrote a short article about the workshop in The Biochemist http://www.biochemist.org/bio/03204/0041/032040041.pdf

Bang Wong just published an interesting article in Nature Methods on the use of colors in figures – http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v7/n8/full/nmeth0810-573.html
Actually this is planned to be the first in a series of regular ‘graphical tips’  in Nature Methods, a plan that was hatched at VIZBI 2010.

The BBSRC and the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) wish to invite applications to attend a multi-disciplinary workshop exploring the challenges of visualising increasingly complex and large-scale biological datasets.

The workshop will take place in Bristol (UK) on November 16th and 17th 2010. Applications are due on August 6th at 4 PM.

Full details are on the workshop website.

At the ISMB 2010 ‘Birds of a Feather’ (BoF) later today, we will lead a discussion through a range of topics related to the major challenges in visualization, plus current and future the community efforts towards meeting these challenges. Notes from the meeting will be available at a Google doc here – any BoF participant that want to contribute to writing this document is welcome – just write to to be added as an author of the document.