Friday, May 29, 2009

We are going to E-biosphere 09

E-Biosphere 09 starts next Monday 1st of June on London. Today we want to announce that most of us, Tim Robertson, Sergio Alvarez, Dave Martin and Javier de la Torre, will be there.

Even more, we have a booth! GBIF & Vizzuality are joining efforts to showcase the recent projects we have been working on and some of the future ones. We are all very excited to showcase what kind of things can be done with biodiversity data and visualizations.

Tim, Sergio and Javier will be present at the booth, but we would like to be present online at the same time. Our idea is to use this blog as the online platform to present the different ideas, prototypes, wireframes, etc that we will showcase at E-biosphere 09. Especially as Andrew could not join us for London. So the blog is our online booth!

In the next few days we will be working hard on different topics, including species distribution, analyses, data integration, indexing, visualisations, taxonomy, data publishing, computing on the cloud, migration paths etc. So stay tuned to know what is going on in multiple posts that we will publish here.

Aditionally you can follow some of us on Twitter:

If you happen to attend e-biosphere please come and join us at the booth, if not we look forward to get your comments on the blog.

See you all in London!

Javier, Tim, Sergio, Dave, Andrew.

A new contributor to Biodivertido

So, I’ve decided to become a blogger. But Javier said that on my quest to riches, I needed to first give a quick introduction. Here you go.

My name is Andrew Hill. I am working on my PhD in Rob Guralnick’s lab in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Colorado. I began working here almost 3 years ago on a project to reconstruct the evolution and spread of influenza through time and over geography (see here or here). Like the influenza itself, my interests have mutated rapidly. Most of my work now involves at least one of three informatics subtypes; biodiversity informatics, phyloinformatics, or (I’m not sure people say this) visual informatics. I have ongoing research on the evolution of influenza, as well as a handful of smaller genomics and bioinformatics projects, and am just now starting work for the OBIS-USA project.

As for my role at Biodivertido, I don’t know yet. Rob, Walter Jetz, and EOL just put on an excellent workshop in Chicago that gave me, Tim, and Javier the opportunity to talk about our interests and coordinate some of our efforts on a couple of new projects. We will likely be giving you more details about some of those in a few hours. So don’t go far from your RSS feed.

For now, all I can say is that I’m extremely excited to be working with these guys and will hopefully be contributing cool things very soon.