Mr Sach Mukherjee

The conference was organized into a total of 14 sessions covering every area of
bioinformatics, from protein structure to gene ontologies. The organizers kept the sessions
short with frequent coffee-breaks in between. This arrangement proved extremely popular as
the breaks provided excellent opportunities to interact one-on-one with speakers, and discuss
ideas in more detail than is possible when asking a question at the end of a talk. Coffee-breaks
also turned out to be an excellent opportunity for ‘targeted’ networking, and over the course
of the conference I was able to have good conversations with most of the researchers on my
list. The setting of the conference could not have been better, with all meals taken in
Stanford's sunny Dohrmann Grove, and posters presented in open-air sessions either side of
the main auditorium. Meal-times proved quite productive too, as I found myself sharing tables
with researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds. This had the effect of opening my eyes
to areas of research that I would otherwise rarely encounter.
My own talk went extremely well, and generated a good deal of interest. I spent several
coffee breaks afterwards discussing my work with interested members of the audience, many
of whom asked extremely good questions. The most useful comments concerned the
biological validation of my largely theoretical results. A key problem in expression analysis is
the scarcity of ‘gold-standard’ datasets, where the truth is known a priori, but several
attendees were able to point me to some very good data upon which to further test my
methods. Indeed, ideas that emerged at CSB have since formed the basis for a new paper
which is currently under review. By and large, my impression was that my work did indeed
raise awareness of some important problems in expression analysis, and that my progress on
addressing those problems was on the right track. I was especially pleased to have a number
of good conversations with biologists and statisticians, and to be invited by several groups to
give seminars to them in the near future. The talk had the further effect of generating interest
in my poster, which I found very well attended once I had given the talk. On my return, I was
also very happy to find that my paper was one of ten or so to have been selected for inclusion
in a special issue of the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
The other talks were generally of a high technical standard, although a few failed to hold my
interest on account of poor presentation. Personally, I found the poster sessions especially
effective, as I was able to understand the work at my own pace and then interact one-on-one
with the authors. Two of the best posters were one by Berger et al. of UCSB on the analysis
of two different kinds of microarray data using a linear algebraic method called ‘Generalized
Singular Value Decomposition’. Another excellent poster was by Xie et al. who showed that
the dynamic range of gene expression measurements depends on the functional category of