VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA VIZBI

Paper submissions to the 2nd Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM) are still possible until March 8th. Posters can be submitted until April 19th. The workshop will be held in Leipzig, Germany, on July 1-2, 2010. Full details are available on the website: http://www.vcbm.org/2010

We have opened a VIZBI 2010 group on FriendFeed. Please join and add your own comments about the talks at http://friendfeed.com/vizbi2010.

Over the last six months we have been working with a group of scientists, including the VIZBI speakers and others, to prepare a series of reviews on visualizing biological data. Today these reviews have been published in a supplementary issue of Nature Methods (Volume 7 No 3 ppS1-S68). In addition to five reviews covering visualization of data from systems biology, genomics, 3D macromolecular structures, alignments and phylogenies, and image-data, the supplement also contains a commentary on future visualization. The editors have also written a 1-page forward and 2-page summary of all reviews. Thanks again to Bang Wong for help with the cover image.  We have written the reviews to be understandable to beginners as well as credible to experts. We believe this collection will be a valuable resource for the community of life scientists using visualization as part of their research.

Our primary goal in the VIZBI workshops is to bring together researchers using and developing methods to visualize a broad range of biological data. Our focus is on the visualization of processed and annotated data in their biological context, rather than the processing of raw data, or on experimental visualization techniques.

Having called together this community, we are now providing this blog as a way of staying in contact. We plan to post here announcements related to the VIZBI meeting, e.g., the publication of articles and videos related of the VIZBI talks. We also plan to post information not strictly related to the VIZBI meeting, but of interest to the VIZBI community, e.g., announcements of other similar meetings, news about other significant publications, or  the launch of new web resources related to visualizing biological data.

In addition, we hope that the blog can be used for discussions that help to identify and exploit synergies between visualization in different areas of research. For example – cases for inter-operation, the re-use of methods or concepts, and common conventions in usability.

Thus, we would like to invite you to contact us if you have news, announcements, or topics you would like to add to the VIZBI blog.