About the Conference
iEvoBio aims to be a forum bringing together biologists working in evolution, systematics, and biodiversity, with software developers, and mathematicians. The goal of iEvoBio is both to catalyse the development of new tools, and to increase awareness of the possibilities offered by existing technologies (ranging from standards and reusable toolkits to mega-scale data analysis to rich visualization). The meeting extends over two full days and features traditional elements, including a keynote presentation at the beginning of each day and contributed talks, as well as more dynamic and interactive elements, such as a challenge, lightning talk-style sessions, a software bazaar, and Birds-of-a-Feather gatherings.
Over 300 participants attended the successful inaugural meeting in 2010 in Portland, Oregon. In 2011, iEvoBio is again held jointly with the Evolution Meetings as a satellite conference, and thus takes place in Norman, Oklahoma. iEvoBio overlaps with the last day of the Evolution Meetings and extends one day longer. The conference is expected to become a self-sustained annual event that remains affiliated with the Evolution Meetings.
iEvoBio is supported by the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB). The Organizing Committee for 2011 is co-chaired by Cynthia Parr (Encyclopedia of Life) and Rob Guralnick (University of Colorado at Boulder), and includes Dawn Field (UK National Environment Research Council), Mark Holder (University of Kansas), Hilmar Lapp (NESCent), and Rod Page (University of Glasgow). You can contact the committee by email at comm...@ievobio.org.
iEvoBio is inspired by a similarly scoped conference for the domain of genome informatics, the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC). BOSC has been running annually since 2000 in association with the premier annual computational biology conference (ISMB), and has been highly successful in its mission.
