Event Date: 16-17 November 2010
Venue: The Thistle Grand Hotel, Bristol

BBSRC and the AHRC are hosting a multi-disciplinary workshop exploring the challenges of visualising increasingly complex and large-scale biological datasets.

Background
Recent advances in analytical technologies and methods in the biosciences have led to a 'data deluge', both in terms of the volume and the complexity of data generated by biological experiments. New ways of interpreting, manipulating and presenting bioscience data are urgently needed to allow researchers to fully exploit the data arising from their experiments. The experiences from other data-rich disciplines in visualising such data give a valuable insight into what can be achieved with modern visualisation technologies and methods. The insights and expertise from computational and information sciences and the creative arts and design are essential for this.

BBSRC and AHRC recognises this as an area where some facilitated networking between different disciplines would be beneficial, and is holding a workshop to bring experts together to explore some of the challenges and possible solutions to the visualisation of biological data, bringing to bear the expertise of the creative and information research disciplines.

Aims

• To showcase current activities, tools and technologies relevant to the visualisation of biological datasets
• To encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations aimed at encouraging the development of creative visualisation tools for the biosciences
• To explore the opportunities and bottlenecks associated with visualising biological datasets
• To provide an opportunity for researchers across the biological, computational and creative disciplines to explore novel ways of obtaining maximum benefit from their research, whether this is by exploiting their biological data or by providing new avenues for the use of IT and creative tools

Outputs
The formal outputs from this workshop will include a report of the main points arising from the discussions, which will be made publicly available and will also be used by BBSRC and AHRC in the development of future strategy in data intensive research.

However, the workshop will only have been successful if new multi-disciplinary collaborations are formed and novel ideas stimulated, which could potentially lead to applications to Research Council (and other) funding schemes.

Who should attend?
We encourage delegates with a broad range of disciplines to attend this workshop, in order to gain maximum benefit for all attendees. These may include, but are not limited to:

• Bioscientists who generate large and/or complex datasets and who wish to extract maximum utility from them using visualisation technologies and methods
• Researchers from disciplines outside the biosciences who currently use visualisation methods to interpret and manipulate their data and who may offer an insight on how to effectively visualise research data
• Information scientists/technologists and computer scientists who produce visualisation tools and who wish to extending these into the biosciences through collaboration
• Designers and creative industry specialists who want to explore the visualisation needs of bioscience researchers through collaboration

Attendance is not limited to those within UK academia. We encourage participation from people from all relevant sectors (academia, public, private, third).

Programme
The workshop starts with lunch on 16 November and finishes at approximately 16.30 on 17 November.

The event will consist of:

2 international keynote speakers
4 plenary talks
Discussion sessions
Posters
Demonstrations

Further details will be available as and when they are finalised.

More details
Please see the BBSRC website.