iEvoBio: where to find out what went on

Now that I'm back in Glasgow, albeit rather jet-lagged, time for a quick summary of the first iEvoBio meeting, held at the Evolution meetings. I thought the meeting went very well, but perhaps I should leave that judgement to others. Meantime, if you want to see what the fuss was about, here are some ways to catch up.

Slides
Presentations from iEvoBio are going up at SlideShare, including the great keynotes by Jonathan Eisen and Rob Guralnick.

Abstracts
Abstracts and some presentations are going up at Nature Precedings, where you can add comments, and vote on abstracts you particularly like.

Challenge
We had five entries for the visualisation challenge. The audience voted for a clear winner, but second place was a dead heat, so we chose to split the second place prize money. Here are the entries:

Place	Screen shot	Link
1st		PhyloBox
2nd equal		jsPhyloSVG
2nd equal		GenGIS
		EOL tree viewer
		Nexplorer

The entries gave live demos and participated in the software bazaar so people could get to play with them hands on. Doing live demos is brave, especially if you have a Twitter client on, as Andrew Hill discovered:

Photos

Photos tagged with "ievobio10" are going up at Flickr, including my photo of Jonathan Eisen's "what would Jesus sequence?" t-shirt.

Twitter
You can follow the iEvoBio tweet stream by searching for ievobio at Twitter. I've grabbed this tweet stream and hope to do something interesting with it when I get the chance. One message that seems clear is that having keynote speakers who have a big Twitter presence is a great help in generating buzz.



The organising committee has a lot to digest as we reflect on the meeting, but personally I really liked the variety of formats (keynotes, short talks, lightning talks, software bazaar, and birds of a feather), the shortness of the meeting (2 days), and the fact that everything was in one place (no jumping between concurrent sessions). Feel free to add your thoughts below.

Evolution 2010 talk schedule for iCal

In a moment of madness brought on by trying to make sense of 10 Mb of conference schedule for Evolution 2010, I extracted the text from the schedule and created a series of crude iCal files that I can add to my iCal calendar on my Mac (and hence sync to my iPhone). This way I can set reminders of specific talks I want to see.

I'm making these ical files available here, on the understanding that you can use them entirely at your own risk (some talks may be missing due to errors in parsing the file).

Mashing up NCBI and Wikipedia using treemaps

Having made a first stab at mapping NCBI taxa to Wikipedia, I thought it might be fun to see what could be done with it. I've always wanted to get quantum treemaps working (quantum treemaps ensure that the cells in the treemap are all the same size, see my 2006[!] blog post for further description and links). After some fussing I have some code that seems to do the trick. As an example, here is a quantum treemap for Laurasiatheria.


The diagram shows the NCBI taxonomy subtree rooted on Laurasiatheria, with images (where available) from Wikipedia for the children of the the children of that node. In other words, the images correspond to the tips of the tree below:



There's a lot to be done to tidy this up, but there is potential to create a nice, visual way to navigate through the NCBI taxonomy (it might work well on the iPhone or iPad, for example).