BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Feb. 26 — Since its inception seven years ago, the Galaxy Community Conference has been a well-attended gathering of biologists, genome researchers, bioinformaticians and others in data-intensive biomedical research around the world. This year, Indiana University Bloomington will play host to the conference’s hundreds of loyal attendees.
Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data-intensive biomedical research and enables easy interactive analysis through the web on arbitrarily large data sets. The Galaxy framework is a major resource in achieving key research goals within the biological field. It provides next-generation sequencing (NGS) tools and workflows for short-read mapping, ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, metagenomics, pile-up analysis, visualization, collaborative pages, and support for Galaxy in the cloud.
The two-day Galaxy Community Conference 2016 (GCC2016) and three preceding days of training and hackathons will take place June 25-29. Featured in the conference will be accepted talks, poster and computer demo sessions, birds-of-a-feather meetups, exhibitors, as well as plenty of networking opportunities.
Keynote speaker Yoav Gilad, a professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago, will kick-start the conference on Tuesday, June 28, with a discussion on the analysis of large gene regulatory data sets.
“Hosting the Galaxy Community Conference this year signifies the strength of IU’s research in bioinformatics and biology generally,” said Craig Stewart, IU associate dean, research technologies, and executive director, Pervasive Technology Institute. “It’s a great way for IU to help promote the importance of Galaxy software in the biology community in the U.S., and thank the Galaxy community for their support of the Jetstream project.”
Besides the opportunity to share and promote ideas and software tools for those within the Galaxy community, the conference provides the perfect platform to introduce Galaxy users to Jetstream—NSF’s first science and engineering research cloud. Researchers in the Galaxy community can interact with Jetstream through a menu of virtual machines that imitate their lab workstation but are able to harness thousands of times the computing power.
In particular, the Galaxy conference will be a worthwhile opportunity for the Galaxy user community and the team deploying the Jetstream cloud environment to learn from and about each other. Attendees will learn how Jetstream can be an effective platform for Galaxy, and will walk away with valuable knowledge on Jetstream.
Conference attendees who want to share their work or research with the rest of the Galaxy community will have many opportunities to do so. The majority of the conference schedule will be dedicated to presentations held by those attending, including oral presentations, posters, computer visualizations and demos (new this year), and lightning talks. Attendees can currently submit their presentation abstracts for consideration.
During the three days of preconference activities, attendees will be invited to participate in data and coding hackathons. There will also be an array of training sessions to choose from, ranging in topics from “Advanced Topics in Galaxy Tool Development” to “Scripting Galaxy using the API and BioBlend.” For more information on the preconference schedule and to register, visit the GCC2016’straining page.
Key points and dates to remember in the line up till GCC2016:
- Early registration is now open
- The training schedule is now available
- Abstract submissions for presentations are currently being accepted
March 25: Oral presentation submission closes
May 20: Poster presentation submission closes
May 20: Visualization and computer demonstration submission closes
This year’s conference sponsors include the IU Pervasive Technology Institute, a premier-level sponsor, gold sponsor, Lenovo, and bronze sponsor, Globus Genomics. Visit the sponsor page for more information on how to become a GCC2016 sponsor.
To learn more about the 2016 Galaxy Community Conference schedule, training, registration and accommodation options, visit: gcc2016.iu.edu.
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Source: Indiana University