Category Archives: Conferences

Citizen Science in Video Games

What I really liked about visiting ISMB last year was their diversity of talks and subgroup meetings in all areas related to biology and computers. Last year I joined two talks about improving bioinformatics education which were really interesting because I hadn’t thought about that before. This year I joined a special session on citizen science.

Citizen science is public participation in scientific research and can be done by almost everyone. I had heard about Foldit or Rosetta@Home but (unfortunately) never participated. Those two projects deal with protein folding (how does a protein reach its final functional 3D structure?) which is an important scientific problem but is computationally very expensive to study. While one of the projects is a screensaver which uses free resources of personal computers, the other is a game where players can get highscores for folding protein fragments manually. Helping science in a playful way is cool by itself but the project that was presented in one of the talks brought this to the next level. A citizen science minigame was integrated into an action game for PCs and consoles.

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ICML 2020: Chemistry / Biology papers

ICML is one of the largest machine learning conferences and, like many other conferences this year, is running virtually from 12th – 18th July.

The list of accepted papers can be found here, with 1,088 papers accepted out of 4,990 submissions (22% acceptance rate). Similar to my post on NeurIPS 2019 papers, I will highlight several of potential interest to the chem-/bio-informatics communities. As before, given the large number of papers, these were selected either by “accident” (i.e. I stumbled across them in one way or another) or through a basic search (e.g. Ctrl+f “molecule”).

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Bayesian Optimization and Correlated Torsion Angles—in Small Molecules

Our collaborator, Prof. Geoff Hutchison from the University of Pittsburg recently took part in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2020 Twitter Poster Conference, to highlight the great work carried out by one of my DPhil students, Lucian Leung Chan, on the application of Bayesian optimization to conformer generation:

Cooking Up a (Deep)STORM with a Little Cup of Super Resolution Microscopy

Recently, I attended the Quantitative BioImaging (QBI) Conference 2020, served right here in Oxford. Amongst the many methods on the menu were new recipes for spicing up your Cryo-EM images with a bit of CiNNamon with a peppering of Poisson point processes in the inhomogeneous spatial case amongst many others. However, like many of today’s top tier restaurants most of the courses on offer were on the smaller side, nano-scale in fact, serving up the new field of Super Resolution Microscopy!

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IEEEGor Knows What You’re Thinking…

Last month, I, EEGor, took part in the Brain-Computer Interface Designers Hackathon (BR41N.IO), the opening event of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Conference in Bari, Italy. Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are a class of technologies designed to translate brain activity into machine actions to assist (currently in clinical trials) as well as (one day) enhance human beings. BCIs are receiving more and more media attention, most recently with the launch of Elon Musk’s newest company, Neuralink which aims to set up a two-way communication channel between man and machine using a tiny chip embedded in the brain. With the further aim of one-day perhaps making our wildest transhumanist dreams come true…

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NeurIPS 2019: Chemistry/Biology papers

NeurIPS is the largest machine learning conference (by number of participants), with over 8,000 in 2017. This year, the conference will be held in Vancouver, Canada from 8th-14th December.

Recently, the list of accepted papers was announced, with 1430 papers accepted. Here, I will highlight several of potential interest to the chem-/bio-informatics communities. Given the large number of papers, these were selected either by “accident” (i.e. I stumbled across them in one way or another) or through a basic search (e.g. Ctrl+f “molecule”).

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A Month in Basel – Summer 2019

I had an opportunity to visit Basel, Switzerland for a month between mid-July to mid-August. The first week began with the ISMB/ECCB Conference 2019, which was a 5 days event. The average temperature was 35 °C with a hottest day reaching up to 39 °C, which was rather too hot compared to a British weather. This weather was perfect to try out ‘floating’ in the Rhine river, which I missed the opportunity to, but would highly recommend it if anyone is visiting Basel in the future.

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Bringing practical bioinformatics to high school classrooms

Back in July a litter of OPIGlets went rooting for interesting science at ISMB/ECCB 2019 in Basel, Switzerland. When not presenting, working on my sunburn, or paying nine Francs for a beer, I made a point to attend talks outside my usual bubble of machine learning and drug discovery. In particular, I spent the latter half of the conference in the Education track, and am very glad I did. I love teaching, and am always excited to learn from more experienced educators and trainers. Today I’m going to talk about a fantastic presentation by Stevie Bain from the University of Edinburgh about introducing practical bioinformatics to high school biology classrooms through the 4273pi project.

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When OPIGlets leave the office

Hi everyone,

My blogpost this time around is a list of conferences popular with OPIGlets. You are highly likely to see at least one of us attending or presenting at these meetings! I’ve tried to make it as exhaustive as possible (with thanks to Fergus Imrie!), listing conferences in upcoming chronological order.

(Most descriptions are slightly modified snippets taken from the official websites.)

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