Mathé Ewy, Busby Ben, Piontkivska Helen
Department of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, 20894, USA.
F1000Res. 2018 Feb 9;7. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.13705.1. eCollection 2018.
Ever return from a meeting feeling elated by all those exciting talks, yet unsure how all those presented glamorous and/or exciting tools can be useful in your research? Or do you have a great piece of software you want to share, yet only a handful of people visited your poster? We have all been there, and that is why we organized the Matchmaking for Computational and Experimental Biologists Session at the latest ISCB/GLBIO'2017 meeting in Chicago (May 15-17, 2017). The session exemplifies a novel approach, mimicking "matchmaking", to encouraging communication, making connections and fostering collaborations between computational and non-computational biologists. More specifically, the session facilitates face-to-face communication between researchers with similar or differing research interests, which we feel are critical for promoting productive discussions and collaborations. To accomplish this, three short scheduled talks were delivered, focusing on RNA-seq, integration of clinical and genomic data, and chromatin accessibility analyses. Next, small-table developer-led discussions, modeled after speed-dating, enabled each developer (including the speakers) to introduce a specific tool and to engage potential users or other developers around the table. Notably, we asked the audience whether any other tool developers would want to showcase their tool and we thus added four developers as moderators of these small-table discussions. Given the positive feedback from the tool developers, we feel that this type of session is an effective approach for promoting valuable scientific discussion, and is particularly helpful in the context of conferences where the number of participants and activities could hamper such interactions.
你是否曾在会议结束后，因那些精彩的演讲而感到兴奋不已，但却不确定所有展示的那些迷人且/或令人兴奋的工具如何能在你的研究中发挥作用？或者你有一款很棒的软件想要分享，但只有少数人参观了你的海报？我们都经历过这些，这就是为什么我们在2017年5月15日至17日于芝加哥举行的最新一届国际计算生物学学会/全球生物信息学大会（ISCB/GLBIO'2017）上组织了计算生物学家与实验生物学家对接会。该会议展示了一种新颖的方法，模仿“相亲”，以鼓励计算生物学家和非计算生物学家之间的交流、建立联系并促进合作。更具体地说，该会议促进了具有相似或不同研究兴趣的研究人员之间的面对面交流，我们认为这对于推动富有成效的讨论和合作至关重要。为了实现这一目标，进行了三场简短的预定演讲，重点分别是RNA测序、临床和基因组数据整合以及染色质可及性分析。接下来，以速配为蓝本，由开发者主导进行小桌讨论，让每位开发者（包括演讲者）介绍一种特定工具，并与周围潜在的用户或其他开发者展开交流。值得注意的是，我们询问了观众是否还有其他工具开发者想要展示他们的工具，因此我们又增加了四位开发者作为这些小桌讨论的主持人。鉴于工具开发者的积极反馈，我们认为这种类型的会议是促进有价值的科学讨论的有效方式，在参会人数众多和活动丰富可能会阻碍此类互动的会议背景下尤其有帮助。
