A Preview of Bio-IT World Expo 2011
Cloud track debuts in Expo’s 10th season.
January 31, 2011 | On April 12-14, Bio•IT World will host its tenth annual conference. All signs point to this being the biggest and most exciting event yet, with two new conference tracks added by popular demand, bringing the total to nine; more than a dozen pre-conference workshops; and a record number of exhibitors. All the regular highlights are there as well, including the 2011 Best Practices Awards dinner, the Benjamin Franklin Award (presented by Bioinformatics.org), and the Best of Show exhibit prizes. Here are just a few of the potential highlights:
New Science Search
Keynoter Stephen Wolfram, the British polymath who authored A New Kind of Science and launched the Wolfram|Alpha search engine two years ago, kicks off the 2011 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in style (see, “Stephen Wolfram’s New Science,” Bio•IT World, May 2003).
Keynote | April 12
Clouds Approaching
A new track in 2011 is devoted to the explosion of cloud computing in life sciences. Speakers include Toby Bloom (Broad Institute), Rick Franckowiak (Johnson & Johnson), Angel Pizarro (University of Pennsylvania), Jason Stowe (Cycle Computing), and Peter Tonellato (Harvard Medical School).
Track 3 | April 13-14
Power Plenary
A special plenary panel features six short presentations in which speakers, including Deb Goldfarb (Microsoft), Martin Leach (Merck), Ken Buetow (caBIG), and Jamie Heywood (PatientsLikeMe), will offer their perspectives on the future of technical computing, pharma IT and translational medicine.
Plenary | April 14
Interested in iRODS?
Giles Day, co-founder of Distributed Bio, will present an introduction to the open-source data management resource that is rapidly gaining traction in the next-gen sequencing community (see, p. 44).
Track 2 | April 13
Data Center Designs
HHMI Janelia Farm’s Vijay Samalam shares his experiences running one of the largest 10G Ethernet networked high-performance computing commodity cluster centers, while Biogen Idec’s Mike Russo discusses the issues involved in redesigning a biopharma data center.
Track 1 | April 13
Next-Gen Informatics
Does the sequencing tsunami mean that people and projects will be left high and dry? Tim Harris (SAIC-Frederick) hosts a panel to discuss the disconnect between next-gen data generation and their interpretation. Other speakers include Paul Aldridge (Genomic Health), David Dooling (Wash U.), Jonathan Rothberg (Ion Torrent), and Keith Robison (Infinity Pharmaceuticals).
Track 5 | April 14
From Bedside to Bench
Susie Stephens (Centocor R&D) demonstrates the Translational Medicine Ontology, which provides terminology that bridges diverse areas of translational medicine, and is helping to integrate sample patient data with linked open data.
Track 9 | April 13
Landscape View
Bryn Roberts (Hoffmann-La Roche) will tour the information landscape and introduce the next generation of user interfaces.
Keynote | April 13
Clinical Complexity
Ken Getz (Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development) discusses the dramatic negative impact that rising protocol complexity is having on clinical trial cycle time, cost and efficiency, and potential technology solutions.
Track 7 | April 14
Trends in the Trenches
Chris Dagdigian (BioTeam) offers his annual and indispensable “Trends in the Trenches” musings on key IT and informatics trends, for both good and bad.
Tracks 1-3 | April 13
Patients, Providers and Payers
John Halamka (Harvard Medical School), returns to examine the emergence of novel patient-sourced data sources and their implications for research and clinical trials.
Track 8 | April 13
Six Lessons
Computational biologist Atul Butte (Stanford) offers some lessons learned from using computational tools to convert 15 billion molecular and epidemiological data points into novel diagnostics and therapeutics.
Track 4 | April 14
This article also appeared in the January-February 2011 issue of Bio-IT World Magazine. Subscriptions are free for qualifying individuals. Apply today.