European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB12) - Day 2,3 & 4

Having enjoyed all the pre-conference events, discussions and workshops it's now time for an overview of the ECCB12 conference itself.

Name: Zsuzsanna Sukosd

Date: 9th to 12th September 2012

Location: Basel, Switzerland

Website: http://www.eccb12.org/

The main conference featured 3 parallel presentation sessions, interspersed by keynotes, highlight presentations and poster sessions. I was surprised to discover that the field of bioinformatics has moved on from traditional sequence analysis to more of a systems-biology approach; there was a lot of focus on interaction networks and large-scale analyses of biological data.

The keynote presentations were all stimulating and highly engaging, even though they were all quite far removed from my own day-to-day research. Particularly popular events included the discovery of the ubiquitin-proteolytic system, biotechnology and light microscopy, the influence of genetics on the societies of hive organisms, structural analysis and protein interaction networks, using medical e-journals to analyse the human population and finally computationally deciphering miRNA regulation.

Personally I found the TechTrack presentations very interesting. I have to admit it wasn't my first choice of sessions (as it was a primarily corporate set of presentations), but I was pleasantly surprised to find more than the usual product advertising. For example, I heard a talk about IBM Watson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)) - the computer that defeated the best-ever Jeopardy! players by a wide margin, using clever machine learning techniques. Of course, the point is not that Watson is really good at playing quiz games. The point is that Watson and similar technologies have a huge potential in integrating and organizing biological knowledge and answering specific questions on the basis of vast amounts of data.

The "Art and Science" presentation also deserves a special note. In this, emeritus Oxford Professor Denis Noble and guitarist Christoph Denoth provided an hour or so of musical entertainment and deep philosophical thought. The double-act, titled "The Music of Life", had actually been inspired by an interaction between them at another conference on bioinformatics, also held in Basel several years earlier. Their musical/philosophical act was a reminder that despite the amazing advances in science and technology, we are still in awe of this thing called Life, and there is still space for reflection and wonder at the sheer complexity of the world. A creative exchange between scientists and artists is also very important, where we can mutually inspire each other. In general, it was a very thought-provoking event and everyone I talked to at the conference said they had never seen anything like it before.

One thing I can say is that the poster sessions were completely overwhelming. I don't know exactly how many posters were exhibited, but I would guess several hundred; it was physically impossible to look at every one of them, even to the extent of reading their title and skimming through the rest. I had pre-selected a small number of posters to visit, which were highly relevant to my own research area. This was a very good idea, as I would never have found these posters just by browsing randomly...

In summary, it was a very good conference, and I definitely learned a lot. I came home scientifically stimulated, with a lot of new ideas - and very exhausted!!

Some lessons learned:

1) If you are presenting a poster, take printouts of your poster and/or paper and hang them up in a folder as handouts alongside your poster. And print a LOT of copies. I printed 15 copies; only put 10 in the folder during the first day, and they were all gone by the early afternoon. By lunchtime the next day, even my extra supplies were gone, and my poster session hadn't even taken place yet!! Next time I'll go for something like 30 or 40 copies. Even that might not be enough...

2) Put your contact information in a large font on your poster. People will want to know who you are, where you come from and how they can contact you -- even when you aren't actually there to tell them this information.

3) Read through the schedule and the list of poster titles very carefully, as soon as you get them in your conference package. Mark the talks you want to go to, and the posters you want to visit. The conference programme is likely to be very packed, and you will have to make quick decisions on what to attend.

4) Make a Twitter account, if you don't have one. Live tweeting at conferences is often encouraged, there's usually a hashtag, or several. (Or maybe it was just because we were a bioinformatics crowd?)

5) Conferences are tiring. Don't overdo the partying! ;)

(Conferencelogo from website. Image of IBM Watson computer from clockready via wikimedia commons)