VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA VIZBI

Connect With Science is a public event taking place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, on Thursday 30 May 2013 from 7:00 pm-8:30 pm, followed by a mixer. The event is part of the VIVID Ideas festival, and will feature two world-renowned biomedical animators: Graham Johnson (UCSF, USA) and Drew Berry (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne), whose work has received international recognition (BAFTA award, 2004; Emmy award, 2005, MacArthur Fellowship, 2010). They will present awe-inspiring animations showing the intricate molecular machines inside your body.

This event is co-organized by ‘VIZBI+ Visualising the Future of Biomedicine’, a new project funded by the Inspiring Australia initiative, the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute, and CSIRO, Australia. For further details, see http://bit.ly/VIVID-VIZBIplus.

HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE:
Does your work bridge science and art? Perhaps you’re an artist inspired by science or perhaps you’re a creative scientist? If so, you have an opportunity to share your work with other like-minded people at the event. Around 8:15 pm, just after the keynote talks and preceding the mixer (8:30 pm onwards), there will be an opportunity for a limited number of participants to briefly introduce themselves and their work to the audience (in approx. one minute, and using one projected image). If you wish to take advantage of this opportunity, please send the image you propose to show (PNG format) plus a one-paragraph description of the work you would present to after you have registered for this event. Submissions close 5pm AEST on Wednesday 22 May. Successful participants will be notified by email on Friday 24 May.

TRAVEL FELLOWSHIPS:
We are excited to be able to offer a limited number of travel fellowships to participants based in Australia who need financial help either for purchasing tickets or to get themselves to the event. If you are applying for financial help, in addition to your image and description of your work, you are also required to submit one paragraph explanation of why you need funding and how you plan to “spread the science” from this event back to your community.

VIZBI 2013 was – once again – a very exciting and engaging meeting; many thanks to the speakers, session chairs, poster presenters, tutors, and all who contributed. Overall, the feedback was extremely positive (see below), indicating that VIZBI continues to address an important need that is otherwise largely unmet. Thanks also to those that took the time to give us feedback, including many useful, specific suggestions for improvement; drawn at random from all feedback respondents, the winner of the Interactive Gesture Camera was Dr James Hogan (QUT, Australia). We hope you can join us for VIZBI 2014 (March 5-7) at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, or again in March 2015, when VIZBI returns to the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA, USA.

At VIZBI 2013, the NVIDIA award for best scientific poster went to James Rosindell from Imperial College London, UK, for his poster ‘OneZoom: A Fractal Explorer for the Tree of Life’. The Autodesk award for best Art & Biology poster went to Christopher Hammang from CSIRO, Australia, for his poster ‘The Hungry Microbiome’. Both awards were decided by popular vote open to all conference attendees. James received an NVIDIA Quadro K5000, and Christopher received a Maya license. Congratulations James and Christopher, and many thanks once again to our two generous sponsors.

A creative summary of the conference is at http://vizbi.org/2013/Photos/: as last year, Francis Rowland from the EBI made sketch-notes for each talk and put them up on flickr. Thanks Francis!

… have begun appearing at http://vizbi.org/2013/Photos/. The images below are thumbnails only - to see larger versions, go to the 2013 photo page.

Here’s the link to the Google doc from the ‘Systems Biology: beyond the hairball‘

The 2013 posters are at http://vizbi.org/Posters/2013. For the Wednesday 6pm Breakout session, participants can propose and vote for topics at http://bit.ly/vizbi2013breakouts (you’ll need to log in with a Google ID). For Twitter please use the ‘#vizbi’ hashtag; we encourage participants to upload photos from VIZBI to Flickr and use the tag ‘vizbi’ – they will appear at http://vizbi.org/2013/Photos/.

A heads-up that conference registration and one-day registration will close Sunday, 17 March, at 11:59 pm EST. However, registration for virtual participation will remain open throughout the meeting.

Autodesk have offered a free Maya license for the best Art & Biology poster at VIZBI 2013. Normally retailing for $3,675, Maya is widely-used for creating interactive 3D applications, video games, animated film, TV series, and visual effects. This very generous prize is offered to participants from academics and industry alike, but cannot be resold.

Each participant can upload one scientific poster and one artistically-inspired ’Art & Biology’ poster. The award for best poster in each category will be decided by popular vote. Participants are asked to judge scientific posters based on how well they communicate work of significant biological insight or importance; the best scientific poster will be awarded the NVIDIA prize. By contrast, the criteria for assessing Art & Biology posters are subjective, so the Autodesk Award will likely go to a poster that is visually compelling and original – it may help to see Art & Biology posters from previous VIZBI meetings. Further details on poster submission and upload are here.

To allow extra time for submissions for this award, we have extended the deadline for upload of Art & Biology posters only until midnight PST, March 17 .

NVIDIA have just confirmed they will again sponsor a very attractive prize for the best poster at VIZBI 2013: their high-end Quadro K5000 professional video card, retailing for US$2,199. One of the world’s fastest GPUs, this card is designed for large-scale visualization of complex data; it supports up to four displays, has 1,536 CUDA Cores, 4GB of GDDR5 memory, a single-precision performance of 2.1 Teraflops, and the ability to render 1.8 billion triangles per second. Such performance allows real-time rendering of stunning photorealistic, interactive 3D scenes. We have extended the deadline for poster upload until midnight PST, March 14 . In addition to scientific posters, each participant can also upload an artistically-inspired ’Art & Biology’ poster (see here for more details). The award for best poster will be decided by popular vote.

Drew Berry is a cell biologist and biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia. He is best known for creating scientifically accurate and visually stunning biological animations that shed light on cellular and molecular processes and enlighten both researchers and the scientifically curious. His work has earned him international recognition including an Emmy (2005) and a BAFTA (2004). In 2010 he was awarded a Macarthur Fellowship. Drew Berry’s animations have been exhibited at such prestigious venues as MoMA and the Guggenheim. More recently, he has won widespread acclaim for his work on the video clip for Björk’s track “Hollow” from her app-based Biophilia album. He was a VIZBI 2011 keynote speaker and this year he will be running a tutorial on how he uses key features of Maya software to produce stunning animations. His VIZBI 2011 keynote address can be viewed here.

Poster upload for VIZBI 2013 is now open – to upload a poster, you need to first register for the VIZBI conference, and you will receive details on the upload process with your confirmation email. To be included in the VIZBI conference, your contribution needs to be uploaded on or before 12 March 2013.

We have also finalized the VIZBI 2013 tutorial program; each tutorial now has a brief description, with links to further details. We have been fortunate to get some very high profile tutors.

Winners of the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge have just been announced. In total, 15 outstanding entries were announced as either winners or honorable mentions in 5 categories (Photography, Illustration, Posters & Graphics, Games & Apps, or Video). The four featured below are (from left to right): a photograph of the microscopic crystals that make up a sea urchin’s tooth (Gilbert & Killian; U. Wisconsin); CT scans that reveal the shell structure of a clam and a whelk (Fung, Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital, Hong Kong); a side-by-side comparison of X-ray and traditional microscope images of several fruits, each containing a tiny seed (Sykora et al., Charles U.); a video showing stunning images of coral symbiomes obtained using laser scanning confocal microscopy (Farrar et al., U. Hawaii). To see all 15 winning entries, click here.

A short reminder that early registration for VIZBI 2013 closes this Friday, Feb 8. Space is limited so register soon to ensure a place.

This year’s program focuses on new and emerging fields, and features contributions from some very high profile scientists, both for the 21 invited talks, as well as the 12 tutorials on March 19, one day prior to the conference.

If you are interesting in promoting your organization or professional society, a range of sponsorship options are also available.

If you cannot join us in Cambridge, USA, you have the option of virtual registration, which allows participation via streaming video and chat. At VIZBI 2013, for the first time, virtual participants can now submit a poster along with a 60 second video presentation, which will be screened during one of the fast-forward sessions (details here).

Early registration for VIZBI 2013 is open until February 8, 2013 – after then, an additional registration charge of $100 will be added for all participants. Poster upload closes March 12, 2013.

Indiana University is offering a free MOOC (massive open online course) in Information Visualization, starting Jan 22, 2013 – for details see http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu.