I just got back from attending the IBRO World Congress in Florence and the CNS*2011 meeting in Stockholm.  All I can say is: lucky me. Okay, clearly that’s not all I can say.  They were both wonderful meetings and it was great to see so much good neuroscience going on.  IBRO had quite the turnout with 4,200 people attending this year.

So that’s ISMB over for another year. The worlds computational biologists are now sleeping off their Austrian wine and Sacher Torte hangovers on flights back home, hopefully inspired and brimming with fresh ideas for the next year. On the whole it seemed a productive and positive meeting, and whilst personal perspectives always differ depending on the tracks attended, there did seem to be several recurring themes.

In this era of “big-data” and supposed data-tsunamis, being able to sift through the vast swathes of information and find what you are looking will become more and more important.

After the launch of the GigScience website last week, and a call for papers this week, it’s now time to start  meeting and talking with potential authors. After a busy batch of conferences hosted by the BGI, including the  first meeting of the Earth Microbiome Project (see the slides and video of our talk) and last weeks Bio-IT APAC

As biological data is now produced faster than it can easily be handled and stored, the dissemination of this data has become a major bottleneck.

UPDATE 01/06/11 I’ve now submitted a modified version of this abstract. Many thanks to all who commented. One of the many conferences I’m going to this year is a fairly big event. The abstract deadline also happens to be very soon too. So I thought I’d post a draft of my abstract here and see what peeps think. Is my Latin correctly formed? What do you think?

I’ve been travelling rather a LOT in the last 6 weeks or so; Rhossili Bay, London, Edinburgh, Leicester, Barcelona, Cambridge. It’s so nice to be back in Bath for a bit again.

Image via Wikipedia For anyone who is interested I thought it might be helpful to say where I am going to be at meetings and conferences over the next few months.