New Zealand Bioinformatics Conference

Te Papa, Wellington, February 13-14, 2003
Te Papa, Wellington, February 13-14, 2003		Sponsors


	The New Zealand Bioinformatics Conference has now finished. We wish to thank our speakers, delegates and sponsors for their help in making the conference a success. If you attended the conference we would value any feedback you can give us. Conference Papers The proceedings of the New Zealand Bioinformatics Conference have now been published in Applied Bioinformatics. Photo Gallery

	Tutorial Session: Dr James Ostell Dr James Ostell will be running a full-day workshop exploring the resources available from the NCBI. In 1988, Dr James Ostell took a position as the Chief of the Information Engineering Branch at the newly formed National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health, USA. Under his direction, the NCBI Information Engineering Branch has produced a central computer infrastructure for biomedical information, covering the published literature, DNA and protein sequences, three-dimensional structures of biological molecules, assemblies of complete organism genomes, human genetics and phenotypes, and more.

	Tutorial Session: Dr Damian Conway Dr Damian Conway will be holding a full-day tutorial introducing beginner and intermediate Perl programmers to parsing biological data using Perl. Damian Conway holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is an Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of numerous well-known Perl modules including: Class::Contract, Text::Autoformat, Parse::RecDescent and Text::Balanced. Damian is part of the core design team for Perl 6 and is the author of the Exegeses. Tutorial Session: Dr Mark Schreiber BioJava is an open-source software project that aims to provide an industry-quality Java library for common bioinformatics tasks. BioJava is part of the open-bio foundation and distributed under the LGPL license which allows commercial software to be freely developed using the library. BioJava was started in the autumn of 1998 at the EBI, and now has over 25 developers from around the world. The core code base contains over 800 classes and more than 130,000 lines of code. It has been designed to be highly modular and tremendously flexible. The course will introduce the core concepts in the BioJava object model and cover aspects of reading and writing common file formats, representing sequences as objects, transcription and translation, analysis of sequence composition and the design and use of Hidden Markov Models using BioJava. A basic working knowledge of Java programming would be a considerable advantage to those attending the workshop, a short on line course can be found at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/. You can also take a look at Mark's quick guide to BioJava at http://bioconf.otago.ac.nz/biojava.