iEvoBio 2013

I attended iEvoBio in beautiful Snowbird, UT last week. iEvoBio is a satellite conference to the larger annual Evolution meeting that lasts for two days and focuses more explicitly on informatics (although apparently Evolution now has its own informatics session.) I presented a software demo of PhyloCommons, which is now in an alpha release. I got some great feedback on usability and have a clear direction forward. Here are my brief, unorganized impressions of the conference:

• No one is sure what the "i" stands for. It's like the "i" in iPhone, right? So what the hell does that i stand for??
• There was representation from a wide array of informatics initiatives and labs. EOL, iDigBio, and BiSciCol seem very promising, and before the conference I hadn't even heard of the latter two. Among many peoples' favorite talks was by Xiao Xiao (of Weecology at Utah State), which was on using big data to test macroecological theory - very different from most of the other talks, but really interesting and very well-suited for this audience (Xiao even won a travel award for having one of the top student talks! Pretty awesome for someone who probably doesn't consider herself an evolutionary biologist.)
• There were some common themes that came up repeatedly in talks, giving a clear idea on what many people have independently decided are pressing problems in biodiversity informatics. Using and linking identifiers is a big one.
• The number of attendees was fairly small: Arlin Stolzfus says he counted 40 on the first day. There was a very unfortunate clash with some Evolution phylogenetics sessions - which most iEvoBio attendees are interested in. The second day had more, although I didn't count how many.
• The afternoon of the second day was set aside for Birds of a Feather sessions, where participants broke into small groups and discussed topics of mutual interest, then reported back. It was great to be able to interact on a more personal level with other attendees. The downside is that people tend to be interested in hard problems, the kind that aren't resolvable in an hour of discussion - so the conclusion coming out of many groups perhaps wasn't as satisfying as people had hoped it would be going in. I suppose that's unavoidable due to the nature of these hard problems. Still, these were very enlightening discussions.
• This was only my second conference. I was surprised to find that some people gave a talk at Evolution, a talk at iEvoBio, and a software demo at iEvoBio, on the same or similar topics. For some reason, I had assumed that you had to pick one. I'll look to be more actively involved in future conferences I attend.
• There was a lot of talk about gender diversity in science - highlighting a setting with a roughly equal gender split, and in which the 6-person organizing committee and two keynote speakers consist entirely of women. An interesting comment that came out of a BOAF group on the topic was to avoid the all-too-common conflation of "womens' issues in science" with when to start a family, etc. Three problems with this: (A) not all women are looking to have kids soon (or possibly ever) so these discussions are irrelevant to these women (who, of course, have plenty of other issues they'd probably like to discuss); (B) these are parents' issues in science, not womens' issues - plenty of men take an active role in the raising of their children; and (C) this only serves to perpetuate unfortunate stereotypes of "women as baby factories" and therefore is counter-productive.
• Carol and 2-year-old Ruben got to come with me, which was great! They played at Snowbird on day 2 and we hung out in Utah for an extra day before returning home. Pro tip: never, ever, choose the red-eye flight when flying with a toddler. Not worth the $100 savings. To make things even worse, our flight was delayed a full hour.
• Snowbird is beautiful, and I had a nice chance to return home. Next year it'll be in Raleigh, NC, so I'll certainly be attending.