My Amazing BOSC 2024 Experience
By Beatrice Mihalache
Examining open source projects has been most useful to me while I am sharpening my coding skills, so I was excited to learn about the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference — BOSC. I am a rising senior at UCLA, studying biophysics and data science. I strongly believe in open source, so I submitted the work I’d done with my PI and my grad student collaborator for a poster presentation at BOSC. My research lab at UCLA allocates conference participation funds only for graduate students, therefore I also included a request for fee waiver with my conference submission. I was excited when a few weeks later I received notification that not only I was accepted as a poster presenter, but that I also got free registration to both BOSC and to the entire ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference!
Attending BOSC and ISMB was such an incredible experience. On Saturday and Sunday I attended different sub-conferences at ISMB including multiple talks on deep-learning applications to biological problems such as enzyme design and protein function prediction. I was stoked and humbled by how much I learned. The coffee and lunch breaks were a super welcome opportunity to network and talk to other poster presenters about their research.
Palais de Congress, the conference venue, at night. The colorful window architecture is cool.
On Monday, BOSC kicked off with Melanie Courtot’s keynote about the necessity for better quality data. I learned more about Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) code, as this was never explicitly mentioned in any of my computer science classes at school.
Tuesday’s talks were also very cool, the most memorable to me being Andrew Su’s keynote, specifically the part where he had us imagine what AI would be like in the future. In a world that is changing at an accelerated pace, this is a difficult exercise, but a valuable one that also gives insight into the skills that will be most valued in future researchers such as creativity and linking interdisciplinary applications together well.
Me in front of my poster at BOSC, enjoying this most awesome experience
One of my favorite conference experiences was going to dinner with some of the conference attendees. Monday night we ate at LOV McGill, an impressively delicious vegan restaurant. It was so valuable to personally connect with people. I sat between Andrew Su, a professor and researcher at Scripps who would be giving the next day’s keynote, and Bhavesh Patel, the founder of the FAIR data innovations hub. It was nice to learn about people’s personal experiences, about how they got to where they are, and also random snippets and stories.
I am most grateful to BOSC’s sponsors Seqera, NIH ODSS, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and GigaScience for helping me attend BOSC. This experience has been invaluable. I am inspired and energized by it. I look forward to applying the things I’ve learned to new projects. I will make sure that all my future projects’ code is FAIR.
The conference was hosted in Montreal, and I had never been there before, so I took this trip as an opportunity to do some sightseeing and exploring, by staying a few extra days after the conference. I was impressed by how well Montreal blends the old architecture with the modern. I climbed the stairs of Mont Royal, ate poutine with some friends I made at the conference, and visited the Museum of Fine Arts and the Archeology and History Museum.