BIOT Symposium in Colorado Springs

The Fourth Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Symposium, 2007 (BIOT-07) was held on the campus of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS) on October 19th and 20th, 2007. This year’s symposium was a great success.

Jugal Kalita, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCCS is the founder of this yearly symposium and was a Co-Chair of this year’s symposium. The small symposium started in Colorado Springs four years ago as a local event, then became regional and is transitioning to become national. The venues for the symposium during the past four years have been UCCS (years 1 and 2), Brigham Young University, Provo Utah (year 3), and UCCS (year 4). In 2008, it will be held in University of Texas at Arlington. In 2009, the Steering Committee for the symposium accepted a site proposal from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

This year symposium featured 20 fully reviewed papers from across the US and abroad. Each paper was reviewed by 3-5 referees from an international panel of scientists. The symposium had four invited speakers including one from the National Institutes of Health. In summary, there were 28 presentations over two days by individuals from almost 20 different institutions including one each from India and Italy.

The acceptance rate of papers for the symposium has varied between 33% and 67% during the past four years. Selected papers from this year’s symposium will be revised and published in the International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications. Jugal Kalita will serve as the Guest Editor for this special issue of the journal.

The Web site for the symposium is www.biotconf.org. Gayatree Buragohain of New Delhi designed the cover for this year’s proceedings.

By Babul Gogoi, New Delhi