Press Release
October 29, 2002
"Where the Action Is": O'Reilly's Second Bioinformatics Technology Conference Investigates Scientific Computing
Sebastopol, CA--From February 3-6, 2003, biologists, computer
scientists, software engineers, mathematicians, and other related
practitioners take up the essential challenge of integrating science
and powerful computational tools at the 2003 O'Reilly Bioinformatics
Technology Conference. This year's conference moves to the Westin
Horton Plaza in San Diego, CA, one of the nation's centers of biotech
activity.
Designed to bridge the gaps between communities, the second O'Reilly
Bioinformatics Technology Conference also targets what may be the most
important issue in bioinformatics: how to get the job done. "In spite
of a year of economic uncertainty, biotechnology and bioinformatics
continue to experience strong growth, and scientific computing
continues to be where the action is," points out conference chair and
O'Reilly & Associates editor Lorrie LeJeune. Elaborates O'Reilly
founder and president Tim O'Reilly, "The fields of genomics,
proteomics, and evolutionary biology are surging forward; clustering
technology and grid computing for applied sciences are being refined
and expanded; and more biologists than ever are programming in Perl,
Python, and Java, and are building their own tools of the trade."
This year's conference promises to be even more appealing to both
academic and industry audiences, and strikes a balance between open
source and proprietary tools for munging biological data. After a full
day of in-depth tutorials, including an encore presentation of Damian
Conway's wildly popular all-day Perl tutorial, three busy days of
conference sessions and events follow. Among the many experts scheduled
to make presentations at the conference are: Alvis Brazma, Microarray
Informatics Group Leader, European Bioinformatics Institute; James
Gosling, co-inventor of Java, and VP and Fellow, Sun Microsystems; Jim
Kent, research scientist at UC Santa Cruz; Suzanna Lewis, Informatics
Group Leader, Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project; Francis Ouellette,
Director, University of British Columbia Bioinformatics Centre; Lincoln
Stein, Researcher, Cold Spring Harbor Lab; and Stephen Wolfram, creator
of "Mathematica" and author of "A New Kind of Science."
Sessions at the O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference explore
topics such as web services, grid computation, visualization, genomics,
algorithms, pipelining and automation of data, and building open source
applications, divided into the following tracks:
Toolkits: The latest tools, methods, and techniques to structure,
visualize, and mine microbiological data. Techniques: New applications that deliver methods and strategies for
high-throughput analysis and visualization. Bioinformatics Overview: Solutions and lessons learned through
real-world clinical development. End-User Applications: Solid grounding in essential methods for
enhancing the researchers experience and results. System Administration and Infrastructure: Creative methods,
techniques, and best practices for collaborative systems and
environments.
Other highlights include:
In addition to planning a concurrent track, Bioinformatics.Org will
present its 2003 Benjamin Franklin Award to Jim Kent. Kent is being
recognized for developing "GigAssembler," a 10,000 line program that he
wrote in a month and then used to assemble the public human genome
fragments, helping to keep the data in the public domain and
unrestricted by commercial patents. An expanded Poster Session is planned for this year's conference.
Posters will continue to be reviewed for inclusion until mid-December. Apple returns as a Platinum Sponsor, with a bevy of its most advanced
hardware and software offerings to stock the Connectivity Room.
James Tisdall, author of O'Reilly's "Beginning Perl for
Bioinformatics," said of O'Reilly's 2002 Bioinformatics Technology
Conference: "I think the most important result of the conference is an
enhanced dialogue between biologists and programmers...the most
satisfying thing to me was the high level of interest on the part of
newcomers to the bioinformatics field who were in attendance. This
enthusiasm is bound to be translated into some good science in the
months and years ahead."
Exhibition and Sponsorship
If you are interested in exhibiting or sponsoring an O'Reilly
conference, contact Andrew Calvo at 707-827-7176, or
andrewc@oreilly.com. To download the Exhibitor and Sponsor Prospectus,
visit conferences.oreillynet.com/bio2003/sponsor_pkt.pdf.
Additional Resources
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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