FoG to Roll into Boston Seaport Wednesday & Thursday

The Festival of Genomics, Biodata and AI - thankfully known as FoG and not FogBA or FogBDA - will be at the Boston convention center this Wednesday and Thursday.  It's an interesting conference that typically has two editions each year, one in London and one here in Boston.  I'll be wandering around the floor part of both days - my beacon/hat to be announced on LinkedIn and Twitter that day (leaning hard towards my yellow University of Delaware hat).  FoG works hard to not be your average scientific conference, and I'd like to run down a few things I'm anticipating.   By the way, the world's largest autonomous lab is less than a mile from the conference site and tours are available during the conference - all you need to do is reach out to the tour coordinator to schedule one.  And I'm that, so DM me on LinkedIn and I can set you up.

The speakers' list includes both well known veterans and rising stars.  I will skim some; my failure to name drop here is simply to avoid a long list ala the whole pages of fish names you can find in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Professor Aronnax loves piscine enumeration!).  Both George Church and Lee Hood are speaking.  Mark Adams from Jackson Labs is speaking - given his many years of working with the recently passed J. Craig Venter, that could be very interesting (and yes, I will restart my series soon).  Broad Institute technical honchos Stacey Gabriel, Gad Getz, and Niall Lennon are all on the agenda.  There's speakers from all walks of biotechnology - academics, startups, big pharma, software providers, reagent suppliers, and more.  

As the meeting title suggests, many talks and whole sessions will have strong AI themes, covering a wide range of topics such as early pharmaceutical research,  One interesting panel, Tuesday at 12:30, is titled "AI Reality Check: Where is it Actually Delivering in Drug Discovery?".  

Speaking of Ginkgo, my colleague Rory Kirchner from Ginkgo Datapoints will be speaking on "Towards 100,000 Small Molecules: Building AI-Ready Transcriptomic Datapoints with DRUG=Seq".  DRUG-Seq is a 3' RNA-Seq fingerprinting method - you perturb mammalian cell lines with drugs or something else and then fingerprint the expression pattern.  

There's a session on spatial technologies Wednesday at 11:30 featuring an all star panel of Ioannis Vlachos, Jasmine Plummer, Katy Boerner and Rong Fan.  That's followed by a session on AI in spatial biology.   Later a session on "Best Practices in Single-Cell and Spatial Sequencing: How to Plan and Validate Experiments".  That's just a subset of what is taking place on the "Spatial Stage". 

That organization into stages is worth paying attention to.  There are eight:  Spatial, Biopharma Data Management, Innovation (a catch-all), Cancer Omics, Multi-Omics Integration, AI in Drug Discovery, Single-Cell, and Epigenetics.  There's also the "Genome Dome".  

Interested in NGS tech?  There's a Broad Institute presentation on the n6Tec iconPCR, an Omega Bio-tek presentation on HMW DNA purification, a talk on Roche's SBX sequencing of cancer transcriptomes.  There's also a talk on long read diagnostics.

FoG has a number of sessions focused on skill development and networking.  Tuesday has a whole segment titled "Computational Biology Upskilling", though unfortunately that is simultaneous with the spatial session.  And with a session on "Skills Amplified AI for Biological Data".  So perhaps one should spin up some agents to attend the parallel sessions?  Another session promises to help you craft your CV to optimize its ability to get past AI filters.

Many conferences today are trying to figure out how to broaden access while not giving away everything - these are businesses and should they get too generous they will cease to exist.  This year FoG is making tickets free to persons working for a healthcare provider, research institution, government body, or pharmaceutical company with a drug pipeline.  There are multiple payment tiers for everyone else.  But there are important provisos - for example, if you have multiple affiliations the most expensive one applies.  So check if you are eligible for a freebie!

Well, that's a very rough skim of only a portion of what FoG offers - check the agenda yourself!  There will also be sponsor booths - looks like over 50 companies across the different categories (including a familiar leafy logo).  

This is one time you shouldn't worry about getting lost in the FoG - it could be amazing!