I suppose it really hit me when the Viennese border control officer asked, “Ah, you must be here for the conference?” That’s when I realised: this wasn’t just any event. ESCMID Global isn’t your average gathering of lab coat enthusiasts, but rather one of the largest clinical infectious disease conferences in the world. Over 16,000 attendees packed into Vienna for their 35th annual congress.
So, was flying across Europe to attend the Glastonbury of conferences, minus the mud, plus the microbes, worth it?
Well… it depends on what you’re hoping to get out of it. If you’re an academic, you might find that a lot of the sessions lean heavily towards the clinical side of things. On the plus side, it made it easier to narrow down my schedule – with over a dozen sessions happening at any one time, a bit of decisiveness goes a long way. Personally, I found the big-name, high-level keynotes and annual updates from organisations like EUCAST the most accessible and informative.
Category Archives: Conferences
Attending LMRL @ ICLR 2025
I recently attended the Learning Meaningful Representations of Life (LMRL) workshop at ICLR 2025. The goal of LMRL is to highlight machine learning methods which extract meaningful or useful properties from unstructured biological data, with an eye towards building a virtual cell. I presented my paper which demonstrates how standard Transformers can learn to meaningfully represent 3D coordinates when trained on protein structures. Each paper submitted to LMRL had to include a “meaningfulness statement” – a short description of how the work presents a meaningful representation.
Continue readingBaby’s First NeurIPS: A Survival Guide for Conference Newbies
There’s something very surreal about stepping into your first major machine learning conference: suddenly, all those GitHub usernames, paper authors, and protagonists of heated twitter spats become real people, the hallways are buzzing with discussions of papers you’ve been meaning to read, and somehow there are 17,000 other people trying to navigate it all alongside you. That was my experience at NeurIPS this year, and despite feeling like a microplankton in an ocean of ML research, I had a grand time. While some of this success was pure luck, much of it came down to excellent advice from the group’s ML conference veterans and lessons learned through trial and error. So, before the details fade into a blur of posters and coffee breaks, here’s my guide to making the most of your first major ML conference.
Continue readingRoche Continents 2024
This July I had the opportunity to be part of the Roche Continents programme [1]. The programme was organised by Roche and LUMA Arles and took place in the beautiful city of Arles in the south of France. Together with 40 students from various disciplines and European universities we discussed and explored the connection between arts, science, and sustainability. The theme of the week was resourcefulness.
For students considering applying to Roche Continents next year, I’d like to offer some insights on what to expect, as well as share a few of my personal highlights from the experience.
Continue readingMy CCDC Science Day Experience
In June, I had the opportunity to visit the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) for Science Day to give a lightning talk on my rotation project with OPIG. The day was packed with presentations from researchers and PhD students collaborating with the CCDC, offering a great opportunity to hear about some of the fascinating work happening there in the fields of Structural and Computational Chemistry.
We kicked off with a dinner at the University Arms in Cambridge. This was a great opportunity to meet people who were attending Science Day in a relaxed environment, complemented by the lovely food and drink.
The next day was all about the talks. The first part of the day was filled with longer talks by more senior PhD students and CCDC researchers, followed by lightning talks from first-year PhD or master’s students. These shorter presentations provided a fast-paced overview of each project.
Continue readingExperience at the Computational Chemistry Gordon Research Conference
This past July I had the absolute delight of attending the Computational Chemistry Gordon Research Seminar and Conference all the way in Portland, Maine. It was my first Gordon experience, which was invigorating seven-day experience with lots of great science and meeting great people!
Since pictures and videos are not allowed at GRCs as they support the presentation of unpublished results, I’ll talk more generally about the conference as a whole and the general science themes related to my work.
Continue readingConference Summary: AIRR Community Meeting VII – Learnings and Perspectives
At the start of June, we (Lewis and Benjie) attended the AIRR Community meeting in beautiful and sunny Porto, Portugal. This meeting was focused on collecting and analysing adaptive immune receptor repertoires. This comprised of two rivalling factions at the conference: the antibody (Ab) people or the T cell antigen receptor (TCR) people. The split was nearly fifty-fifty between these two topics throughout the conference. Overall, the conference was a fairly comfortable size, with approximately a hundred people in attendance, making it easy to visit all of the posters and talk with many people in your area, without feeling too niche. There was a wide variety of content formats throughout the conference including posters, scientific talks, lightning talks, software demos, and hands-on tutorials. In the following section, we highlight some of our favourite sessions to give a flavour of what this meeting entails.
Continue readingConference summary: Generative AI in Life Science
This year I attended the second edition of Generative AI in Life Science (GenLife – https://genlife.dk/) and it was an enriching experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. Held in Copenhagen, the event brought together researchers from different areas of AI applied to the life sciences and provided a fantastic platform for networking, learning and sharing ideas. The programme included a mix of long and short talks from experts in the field, but also had a significant presence of emerging PIs, making the conference a perfect place to discover emerging groups in the field. Here I have collected some highlights of the talks I have enjoyed the most at the conference.
Continue readingMy take on the Collaborations Workshop (CW) 2024
At the end of April, I attended the CW 2024. This yearly hybrid event organised by the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) has been running since 2011! The event brings people together to discuss best practices and the future of software in research. This year’s event themes were (1) AI/ML tools for Science, (2) Citizen Science and (3) Environmental sustainability.
As a Research Software Engineer (RSE) working with OPIG, I felt a great curiosity to attend and find out what I could bring of use to the group, as most people work on AI/ML applications. In this blog post, I share a few bits of the event which resonated with me and I found most interesting and relevant to share with my group.
Continue readingConference Summary: MGMS Adaptive Immune Receptors Meeting 2024
On 5th April 2024, over 60 researchers braved the train strikes and gusty weather to gather at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford and engage in a day full of scientific talks, posters and discussions on the topic of adaptive immune receptor (AIR) analysis!
