Ed's Big Plans

Brief: The BIBM09 conference was the very first conference I have ever attended. I learned a lot from the various speakers and poster sessions–

I thought it was really interesting how the trend is to now study and manipulate large interaction pathways in silico– a theme of which is the utilization of many different data sources integrating chemical, drug and free text as well as the connection of physical protein interaction pathways and gene expression pathways. There was even a project which dealt with the alignment of pathway graphs (topology).

Dealing with pathways especially by hand and in the form of a picture is probably the bane of many biologists’ existence– I think that the solutions we’ll see in the next few years will turn this task into simple data-in-data-out software components, much like the kind we have to deal with sequence alignments.

And now, back to the real world!

Addendum: My talk went very well

And here are my slides with a preview below.

Warning: This post is highly non-sequitur– it’s late at night and my brain is full of science.

Wow! I’m learning a lot and having a blast– I’ve met a lot of people and have managed to fill the entire day with workshops and tutorials. The venue is convenient, being right in a hotel (Hyatt).

To be more precise, the conference isn’t really in Washington. It’s in Bethesda.

My talk hasn’t come up yet, but my slides are 100% done– I just have to review them until I start to twitch uncontrollably. Today was the first day filled with talks, so I’m feeling a bit light headed and needing of sleep to digest away all of the information.

One key thing I want to take home to my current project is the use of tetrahedral tessellations called simplices to express protein topology and structure– there’s something very useful about that when searching for regularities and especially when dealing with stability.

Aside from going to workshops, each attendant is asked to fill in a ballot to indicate which of the posters on display are the best of show. We get to nominate three– and I’ve chosen mine for today. For me, it was an easy choice to pick the top two while the last nominee was originally tied. An additional poster show will start on Nov. 3rd.

Brief: The paper I codenamed MSc-X2 / MSc-IEEE was just accepted… Final version due on Sept. 1st? Conference in November? But I’m going on vacation! I’ll patch what I can and figure out what else needs to be done with Stefan!

Brief: That IEEE November conference paper Stefan and I had been working on was finally submitted in the wee hours of last night. The newborn weighed in at the IEEE specified 6 pages, single spaced.

Just for fun, here’s a really zoomed out view of pages 1, 4 and 6.

Brief: Not a lot to report, papers are being edited and written– I’ve just finished the QSAR briefing, NGN design and experimental design sections of the IEEE paper… Thesis corrections are due Monday…

Brief: Met with Stefan today. The conference paper we’re working on has a page limit of eight pages, not six– but I’ve just been told this must include everything including the references and of course figures. With respect to the thesis, the request for examination paperwork has just been completed, and the abstract for the thesis document has been submitted. A few corrections are to be completed on the thesis document. Present work focuses on said corrections, the conference paper and software completion for Chris’ project. There is presently no benefit to working on anything more in parallel.