VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA VIZBI

The VIZBI 2014 art & biology submissions are now available at: http://vizbi.org/Posters/?category=Art&year=2014

The VIZBI 2014 posters are now online! As you will see, some quite exciting new work will be presented next week! Note that the art & biology submissions remain unpublished – they will first be revealed prior to the outreach keynote on Thursday evening, then displayed on various screens.

March 15 is now the deadline for BioVis 2014 papers. Possible contributions include full scientific papers, scientific posters, participation in a data contest, or in a redesign contest. BioVis 2014 (July 11-12) will be held as a special interest group (SIG) meeting associated with the ISMB conference in Boston, MA, USA. For further details see http://biovis.net/.

For the upcoming Faraday Discussion on Molecular Simulations & Visualizations (7-9 May 2014; Nottingham, UK), the deadline for submitting a poster has been extended until March 10. Organized by the Royal Society for Chemistry (RSC), the discussion will bring together internationally recognised experts in applying advanced visualization (visual analytics, virtual and augmented reality, immersive graphics, GP-GPUs, cloud computing) to analyse molecular simulations across a range of applications in biology, chemistry, and materials science.

Bursaries for students and early career scientists are still available, which are worth £150.

http://www.rsc.org/ConferencesAndEvents/RSCConferences/FD/FD169/Registration.asp

In this video, Drew Berry talks about a unique exhibit he created for Melbourne’s White Night, which took place last weekend. Drew gave a keynote talk at VIZBI 2011, ran a tutorial at VIZBI 2013, and also plans to attend VIZBI 2014.

On the Tuesday evening before VIZBI (March 4), there will be a meeting of the Heidelberg Unseminar in Bioinformatics (HUB), a regular social event focused on design and visualisation in biology. Bring along any scientific figures you’re working on that you’d like to discus with others to brainstorm for ways to develop/improve. There is also the opportunity to give a 3-minute-max flash talk on your work in visualising biological data.

To join, either sign in for a HUB wiki account and add your name to the HUB10 participant list or send a mail with your name and affiliation to hub-hub@gmx.net.

Come and meet VizBiers and local Heidelbergers, the evening before VIZBI!

VIZBI 2014 delegates can now propose and vote on topics for discussion during the two unconference breakout sessions scheduled after the afternoon coffee break on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th March.

This will be the second time that we have run these un-conference style group discussions. The VIZBI 2013 breakout session included discussions on ways of improving visual communication in papers, dealing with ‘balls of yarn’, and exploring highly variable regions in sequencing data. It also provided an opportunity for community building – and two of the biggest groups discussed the 2013 BioVis contest and the collaborative development of javascript libraries for biological visualization. One of the most important parts of an unconference is that discussion doesn’t take place behind closed doors. Delegates can move between groups until they find a topic they’d like to sit in on, and representatives are elected to present lightning talks the following day.  These allow everyone attending VIZBI to hear the results of each discussion.

With two unconference breakout sessions this year, and a Heidelberg Unseminars in Bioinformatics meeting on the evening of the tutorial day, there are lots of opportunities for you to get together with like-minded members of the biological visualization community for constructive discussion. So, if you are coming to VIZBI 2014 and have a topic you want to explore, then check your inbox for the link and propose your topic now!

Next Saturday (Feb 22), as part of the White Night Melbourne 2014, the renowned biomedical animator Drew Berry will transformed the Melbourne State Library’s domed reading room into a vast microscope with a magnifying power of 1 billion times. The artwork examines eight different types of human virus in ultra-high resolution detail. Every two minutes the room switches to a different type of virus, including herpes, influenza, HIV, polio and smallpox. Depending on the type of virus and the way it stores it’s genetic code, long snaking coils of DNA or it’s more ancient cousin RNA, grip and slide across the walls like agitated Chinese dragons.

All of the molecular models, including the virus outer shells on the ceiling and the long DNA molecule, has been built to scale, using the raw scientific data from X-Ray crystallography. Every two minutes, an immune defence is released from the floor of the host room – either fluttering antibodies or hormone swarms – removing the virus overhead, and transitioning to the next virus type.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/drew-berry-dna-dances-as-imagination-goes-viral-at-white-night-20140214-32rgg.html

Update: there is also an interview with Drew featuring scenes from the exhibit.

For the upcoming Faraday Discussion on Molecular Simulations & Visualizations (7-9 May 2014; Nottingham, UK), the deadline for submitting a poster closes soon (24 February), as does the deadline and for early-bird registration (17 March). Organized by the Royal Society for Chemistry (RSC), the discussion will focus on the use of advanced visualization (visual analytics, virtual and augmented reality, immersive graphics, GP-GPUs, cloud computing) to analyse molecular simulations across a range of applications in biology, chemistry, and materials science.

Note that the RSC offers bursaries for student and early career members to attend the meetings; for details, see the registration section of the web site (http://rsc.li/fd169).

Winners of the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge have just been announced. In total, 18 outstanding entries were announced as either winners or honorable mentions in 5 categories (Illustration, Posters & Graphics, Photography, Games & Apps, or Video). The four featured below are (from left to right): a stylized illustration of showing cerebral cortex, axons, and dendrites (Greg Dunn et al. from U. Pennsylvania & Johns Hopkins U., USA); a time-lapse photograph showing water swirling in a vortex above two millimeter-sized coral polyps (Vicente I. Fernandez et al. from MIT, USA); a photograph of stellate leaf hairs from the shrub Deutzia scabra (Steve Lowry Photography, UK); and a still from a video titled ‘Visualizing Leaf Cells from Within’ (Geoffrey J. Harlow et al. from UC Riverside, USA). To see all winning entries, click here.

The 4th Symposium on Biological Data Visualization (BioVis 2014, July 11-12) has announced its call for participation, inviting contributions on all aspects of visualization in biology, from molecular to cell, tissue, organism and population biology. Possible contributions include full scientific papers, scientific posters, participation in a data contest, or in a redesign contest. For the first time, BioVis will be held as a special interest group (SIG) meeting associated with the ISMB conference in Boston, MA, USA.

BioVis is an interdisciplinary event featuring original, peer-reviewed scientific work covering all aspects of visualization in biology. The symposium brings together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and engaging visualization researchers in problems in biological data visualization as well as bioinformatics and biology researchers in state-of-the-art visualization research. For further details see http://biovis.net/.

A quick reminder that the deadline for VIZBI 2014 registration is tomorrow, 31 January 2014 at 23:59 Pacific time (PST). For further information, go to http://vizbi.org/2014/Registration/.

If you have not yet registered for a VIZBI tutorial, fear not! The registration deadline for tutorials has now been extended to February 15. There are 14 tutorials to choose from, details of which can be found in the posts below or on the VIZBI 2014 Program page. Please note this applies only to tutorials: the registration deadline from the VIZBI 2014 conference is still January 31.

Some more exciting news: Autodesk have once again offered a free Maya license as a prize for the best Art & Biology poster at VIZBI 2014. 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 academia and industry alike, but cannot be resold.

Each conference participant can upload one artistically-inspired Art & Biology image with accompanying text. The deadline for entering is 23:59 PST on 15 February 2014. These images will first be revealed during a special event as part of the Art & Biology evening. The award for best Art & Biology submission will be decided by popular vote and announced at the Awards Ceremony during the VIZBI 2014 closing session. Participants are asked to choose their favourite Art & Biology submission based on how visually compelling and original it is; it may help to see Art & Biology submissions from previous VIZBI meetings. Further details on submission and upload are here.

So, if you’re still waiting for another reason to register for VIZBI, here it is: submit an Art & Biology poster and win a Maya license!

NVIDIA have confirmed they will again sponsor a fantastic prize for the best scientific poster at VIZBI 2014: 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. The deadline for poster upload is 23:59 PST, February 15. 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 scientific poster will be decided by popular vote.