(In addition to Ben’s recap posted on Friday…)

Several members of the lab returned last week from a fantastic ISMB 2012 conference July 13-17. As always, the science was fantastic, as was the networking with colleagues and collaborators.

The Su Lab was also well-represented in the conference program.

Ben Good organized a Special Session on Harnessing community intelligence for bioinformatics. Despite being held on the afternoon of the last day, it was a fantastic success. Attendance and participation were great, and several audience members commented on how much “fun” the session was. Ben also co-authored three papers in the Bio-ontology SIG, co-authored another poster, and presented his own poster on “An online game for human phenotype prediction”:

I (Andrew Su) presented one of the talks in Ben’s special session on The Gene Wiki: Crowdsourcing the annotation of human gene function:

Chunlei Wu presented a talk in the Technology Track on BioGPS: a community-driven customizable gene annotation portal, as well as a poster on the same topic:

Salvatore Loguercio presented a paper in the Bio-ontologies SIG as well as a poster in the main conference, both on the use of games to crowdsource the creation of structured gene annotations:

Ben and Sal’s work was also featured in a BioInform article on games in biology (paywall).

Finally, Erik Clarke presented a paper at the Bio-ontologies SIG on “A Task-based Approach to Gene Ontology Evaluation” (which can be found in the SIG proceedings). In one of the highlights of the conference, Erik’s paper was selected as the best paper in the SIG. Congratulations Erik! This is also a good time to wish Erik the best of luck as he leaves the lab this week to attend graduate school in the Penn GCB program. From his 16 month stay in the lab, he co-authored three papers in peer-reviewed journals in addition to this award-winning conference paper.

Another great ISMB. Looking forward to next year in Berlin!