HOW TO BECOME COSI WITH A COMPUTATIONASL BIOLOGIST - Join Us on Sunday, July 13, at ISMB to learn more

By Christine Orengo

"That was a great meeting. Let's stay in touch." How often have you said this at the end of a meeting after connecting with new colleagues you wanted continue sharing ideas with? The internet has given us access to infinitely more data than we know how to manage and the potential for great insights if we know how to transform this data into knowledge. How can we better connect scientists within specialized research areas and facilitate meetings and discussions that only require the cost of a cup of coffee and a good internet connection?

In the best spirit of being a scientific society, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is exploring strategies to make this happen. In the 21st century, ISCB envisions connecting computational biologists in a virtual meeting place and is considering how to promote virtual networks and make the Society a year-round hub of electronic activity by setting up web communities that can share information, hold meetings, and discuss ideas 'long distance' via the internet. These Communities of Special Interest (COSIs) will be built around major research themes within computational biology, or important activities such as networks of training, mentoring, or financial support. The COSIs will be founded initially with communities originating from Special Interest Groups (SIGs) or workshops who have been organizing events at ISMB.

A special session will take place at ISMB (recording will available online after the meeting) to launch the COSIs. Representatives from each COSI will describe their community and their current and future activities. This launch will also give the COSIs a chance to advertise social events or birds of a feather-type activities for people who didn't attend their corresponding SIG or workshop and will provide a venue for COSI members and meeting attendees to interact in person. ISCB will also make sure that all the talks that relate to COSI themes or activities are tagged as such in the conference program to make it easier for attendees to find talks that best fit their research interests or COSIs.

This is just the beginning. One can imagine that special COSI social events during the main ISMB meeting will provide opportunities for people working on similar scientific problems or facing similar issues with training or bioinformatics support to meet and get to know each other better. It always helps to put a face to that name on the electronic forum you�ve been following or that person you've been exchanging emails with! We hope that you will support the COSIs, and let us know if there other emerging communities who might want to become a COSI in the future.

COSIs BEING LAUNCHED AT ISMB, BOSTON, JULY 2014
3D-SIG	Structure-based drug discovery. Structure representation, classification and prediction Structure-based function prediction. Docking - protein-protein, protein-ligand and protein-nucleic-acid. Protein dynamics; Structural Evolution; Macromolecular assemblies; Structural genomics
Automated Function Prediction (AFP)	The mission of the Automated Function Prediction COSI is to bring together computational biologists, experimental biologists and biocurators who are dealing with the important problem of gene and gene product function prediction, to share ideas and create collaborations.
sBioinfo-Core Bio-Ontologies	Bioinfo-core is a worldwide body of people that manage or staff bioinformatics cores within organizations of all types. We provide a forum for bioinformatics core managers and staff to discuss issues pertaining to the operation of their core, evaluation of data analysis software tools, and management of relationships with the users of cores.
CAMDA	CAMDA presents a crowd sourcing and open-ended data analysis challenge format which focuses on big heterogeneous data sets that are increasingly produced in several fields of the life sciences.
Computational Biology Education (COBE)	The ISCB Computational Biology Education (CoBE) COSI focuses on bioinformatics and computational biology education and training across the life sciences. A major goal of this COSI is to foster a mutually supportive, collaborative community in which bioscientists can share bioinformatics education and training resources and experiences, and facilitate the development of education programs, courses, curricula, etc., and teaching tools and methods.
Computational Mass Spectrometry (COMP-MS)	The ISCB CoSI CompMS is a joint initiative with the HUPO Computational Mass Spectrometry Initiative (HUPO CompMS). It promotes the efficient, high quality analysis of mass spectrometry data through dissemination and training in existing approaches and coordination of new, innovative approaches. The CompMS initiative aims to exploit synergies between different application domains, in particular proteomics and metabolomics.
Network Biology	As more research fields turn to network visualization and analysis for perspective, our Network Biology Community serves to introduce novel methods and tools, identify best practices and highlight the latest research in the growing and interconnected field of network biology
Open Bioinformatics Forum (OBF)	The Open Bioinformatics Foundation or OBF is a non-profit, volunteer-run group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community.