Community Intelligence session at ISMB 2012

Looking for something to do in Long Beach, California on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 17, 2012 ?  Stop by the special session on Community Intelligence in Bioinformatics at this year's conference on Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB)!

We have four distinguished speakers lined up:

• Alex Bateman will discuss the use of Wikipedia in RFAM, PFAM and the rest of science.
• Alex Pico will tell us about the continued expansion of WikiPathways.
• Andrew Su will be on tap to discuss the latest and greatest breakthroughs in the Gene Wiki.
• Firas Khatib will tell us how his team managed to translate protein folding into a game (called Foldit) and that game into an expanding series of scientific discoveries.  

With nearly 7 billion people on the planet and a rapidly increasing number of them connected to the Web, it is time to figure out how to work together effectively, both to solve the problems that we are collectively causing and to solve the problems whose solutions will extend and enrich all of our lives.  Each of these talks will try to help answer the question of how we can translate the incredible scale, connectivity, and creativity of the world's population into scientific progress.  Hope to see you there.

community annotation workshop - what is working? what is not?

If you are interested in progress on the front of community intelligence in biology, the wrap up from the GMOD community annotation satellite meeting is well worth a look.

A couple highlights

• Fail: "UniProt, a pan-biology resource if ever there was one, had 46 million page views lead to only 9 comments being submitted. "
• Win: Following in line with the "distributed grid of undergraduate students" approach to gene annotation, the CACAO project has achieved "stunning" success. They get teams of students to compete against each other on both quantity and quality of annotations. Quality is determined in Scrabble-esque fashion where points are awarded based on the opposing team's ability to successfully challenge and disprove the other team's annotations.