iEvoBio

iEvoBio

This year’s event will occur after the meeting on June 26, from 9 am to 5 pm at the Omni Hotel. Watch this space for calls for participation!

In Brief

News:

The Meeting

This year’s theme is “Enabling the next generation of computational biologists.” We will have two sessions, morning and afternoon. The morning session will have a round of 12-minute talks from computational evolutionary biologists in various careers (R1 faculty, primarily undergraduate institution faculty, government). They will speak briefly about their research and how it is enabled by computation, and how they balance computational work with the outputs they need to produce in their role. This will be followed by a panel discussion of pre-selected and audience questions about careers in computational evolutionary biology. We will aim to answer the following questions:

  • How have you balanced software development or computation with the outputs you need to be successful in your career?
  • How does your position reward, or not reward, software work?
  • What does mentoring students and staff mean for your career?
  • What are the special challenges for evolutionary biologists who want to have a career like yours?
  • What funding sources have been helpful on your career path?

More information on the morning session can be found on the morning schedule.

The afternoon session will be an education session focused on helping undergraduate and graduate students learn to effectively use scientific computation. This session will begin with 10-minute contributed talks from the community discussing delivering computational coursework. See below if you would like to contribute a talk on courses or workshops that you lead. We will follow this with a Birds of a Feather session aimed at getting instructors serving similar student groups together to discuss syllabi, technical challenges, and assessment. We will aim to answer the following questions:

  • What are evolutionary biologists being taught about computation?
  • What should evolutionary biologists be taught about computation?
  • What are the dominant technologies for serving course content to biologists, and how are they suceeding? How are they failing?

The tentative afternoon schedule, with birds of a feather captains is here. If you would like to give a lightning talk on the computational biology course you teach, use the issue tracker to fill out the talk template.

Registration will be $85 for for faculty and professional attendees registering in conjunction with the Evolution meetings. Registration will be $30 for graduate students and postdocs in conjunction with the Evolution meetings.

Registration will be handled via the main conference registration site.

How to submit a proposal for a lightning talk or software bazaar

We are going coordinate this pre-conference discussion through GitHub. GitHub is a website that can be used to share source code. It also provides a nice forum-like discussion tool through “issues”. We ask anyone who would like to present to the Software Bazaar or lightning talk, to open an issue. The issue is prepopulated with a template for each of the possible proposal types. Fill in the appropriate inputs for your submission. Each iEvoBio participant can submit one lighting talk and one Software bazaar proposal.

We encourage all users to discuss these topics, find like-minded people to work with at iEvoBio or make contact with software developers for whom you have questions. The discussions on GitHub are subject to our Code of Conduct.

Student Travel

We will have some funds to remunerate students to extend their stay at the meeting for this event. The form to apply for funds is here.

What is GitHub and why do a need an account?

We want the short amount of time we have for iEvoBio to be as useful as possible for everyone who attends. For that reason we encourage conference-goers to talk among themselves about what they might work on, talk about or hope to learn during the meeting.

In order to contribute to these discussion you will need to sign up for an account at https://github.com/join. Github provides some nice documentation for making the most out of github issues, though none of the features described there are needed to contribute to a discussion.