At ISMB 2010 we will be hosting a 1-hour ‘Birds of a Feather’ discussion on visualizing biological data (see here for details). We plan to cover the major visualization challenges identified in VIZBI 2010, and to discuss community efforts aimed at improving integration, effectiveness, and usability of visualization in biology. Please contact us if you would like to propose topics or disseminate announcements. All are welcome!
Time: Monday, July 12, 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Room: 304
The UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council is organising a meeting to explore the challenges of visualising biological data. The registration deadline is the 6th August 2010.
iEvoBio is short for ‘Informatics for Phylogenetics, Evolution and Biodiversity’, and is a new meeting which is being held as a satellite of the Evolution 2010 meeting which takes place in Portland, Oregon (US) this year.
iEvoBio takes place from June 29-30th and provides a forum for mathematicians, software developers, bionformaticians and evolutionary and computational biologists to discuss their work. The meeting includes a software bazaar and a challenge session, which is focused this year on exploring new methods for the visualization of evolution.
The deadline for submissions to the iEvoBio Visualization Challenge and the Software Bazaar is 21st June 2010.
In preparing the Nature Methods special issue on visualizing biological data, our goal was to create a useful resource for the experimental biology community. In the last month since it was published, there are indications that it is having an impact. It was featured prominently on the websites of Nature and Nature Biotechnology, and has also been featured on several blogs related to visualization and biology: e.g., Vizworld, Bioephemera, Timothy M. Kunau, ISPRS WG II/6 blog on Geographical Visualization and Virtual Reality, Getting Genetics Done, HENRY, Vallve’s Blog, QuimBiología, and Serialized Thoughts. In addition the special issue was covered in several FriendFeeds from Simon Cockell, Brad Chapman, and Abhishek Tiwari (who runs an interesting blog called fisheye perspective on visual analytics and bioinformatics). The issue was also covered by tweetmeme from joergkurtwegner. The PDFs from the special issue are still freely available, but I believe that soon they will be available only to Nature Methods subscribers – so best to grab them now if you want them, and tell any colleagues who may be interested.
Here are links to upcoming or recent meetings that include talks or sessions related to both visualization and biology. If you know of others, leave a comment or contact me and I’ll add them to this post. Eventually this post will probably evolve into a separate page.
ISMB 2010 in Boston will feature a special session on visualization of biological networks. The session will focus on the discussion of use cases and standardization of input and output, as well as integration of tools. More background and details about the session are available on the ISMB 2010 website.
The poster submission deadline for the 2nd Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM) has been moved to May 5, 2010.
The workshop will be held in Leipzig, Germany, on July 1-2, 2010 and will address the integration of state-of-the-art visualization and image analysis for application to research in biology and medicine.
You may be interested in some Wikipedia pages we started that aim to provide a comprehensive list of computational tools for visualizing biological data. Starting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_data_visualization you can access lists of tools for different areas, e.g., alignment, phylogeny, molecular graphics. The pages for systems biology and microscopy currently have only very few tools, and for MRI there is currently no ‘list of’ page. So, we encourage everyone to add their favorite tools! This will give visibility to your favorite tools, and will make these Wikipedia pages a more valuable resource for the community.
Actually there is a back-story to these pages: due to space limitations, in the Nature Method special issue we were very restricted in the number of visualization tools we could mention. As a result, the list of tools cited was ultimately a subjective selection. This was a bit frustrating, as we were forced to remove for the tables several tools we liked. Thus the idea came about to create a more comprehensive list of visualization tools in each field. And the Wikipedia ‘list of’ pages seemed like an ideal place.
In this video of the final 30 minutes of VIZBI, the session chairs shared their impressions of the most important themes and challenges to emerge during the meeting.
There are already some photos from VIZBI 2010 on flickr – we would encourage others to put their photos there and use both tags ‘vizbi2010’ and ‘vizbi’ – here are some examples:
We have now switched to using http://feeds.feedburner.com/vizbi – please update your RSS reader to be sure you get all future blog entries.
In case you missed it, here are the winners of the 2009 international Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.
If you want to stay up to date on everything VIZBI-related and get news about similar events, start following our Twitter feed: http://www.twitter.com/vizbi or our Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/vizbi, or on Facebook. This is in addition to the VIZBI wiki http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/VIZBI2010.
This week in Cambridge, UK, is a 2-day meeting on science, art and visualisation called ‘Have you seen a molecule’
The VIZBI workshop was funded by the EMBO and they would now like your feedback before 15 March 2010. Please take the time to fill out the EMBO questionnaire. It is very important that EMBO receives feedback from as many participants as possible, as this information will strongly influence their decision to fund any future VIZBI meetings.
In addition, you are also encouraged to send any comments, suggestions, or criticisms about the workshop directly to VIZBI committee. We can be reached at the following email address:
The winner of the first VIZBI prize goes to Christian Grove (California Institute of Technology, Arcadia, United States of America) for his poster on the Virtual Worm, co-authored with Paul Sternberg – congratulations Christian!
Together with the session chairs, the five images+abstract below have been selected as finalists for the VIZBI prize. The final winner will be announced after Bang Wong’s keynote talk later today.
We are planning to put the VIZBI poster images in Microsoft Silverlight. If anyone at VIZBI has (or would like to have) experience in Silverlight please contact Jim.
Following a conversation with Steve Pieper, he set up a Wiki and has invited VIZBI participants to use it for sharing their notes on VIZBI. I’m planning to post to it – feel free to join: http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/VIZBI2010. To edit this wiki, you need to create an account (to fight spam) – just be sure to mention you are associated with the VIZBI meeting when you make an account. Thanks Steve!
