Finally back home from another ACS National Meeting, this time in San Francisco. While the location is certainly an attraction, there was some pretty nice talks and symposia in the CINF division such as the Visualization of Chemical Data, Metabolomics and Materials Informatics. Credit for these (and all the other) symposia go to the organizers who put in a lot of effort to get an excellent line up of speakers – as evidenced by packed rooms. This time, I finally got round to visiting some of the other division – some excellent talks in MEDI.  As in the past, there was a Blue Obelisk dinner, this time at La Briciola (a fantastic recommendation from Moses Hohman and the CDD crowd) where there was much good discussion.  I got a Blue Obelisk Obelisk from PMR (Cameron Neylon and Alex Wade were also recipients this year).

CINF had some excellent receptions where I got to meet old faces and make some new friends – with many of whom I’ve actually had many virtual exchanges via email or Friendfeed. Here’s a picture of me and Wendy Warr from one of the receptions.

With the meeting over and most of the follow up now, I can take a bit of a break while the last few submissions for the Boston program come trickling in. And then I get down to finalizing the program for the Fall meeting. This fall, we have an excellent line up of symposia including “Data Intensive Drug Design“, “Semantic Chemistry and RDF” and “Structure Activity Landscapes“. At the Fall meeting, I’ll also be chairing a COMP symposium titled “HPC on the Cheap” where an excellent set of speakers will be focusing on various technologies that let users access high performance computing power at a fraction of the price of super computers – stuff like FPGA’s, GPU’s and distributed systems such as Hadoop. This is part of the “Scripting and Programming” series, so expect to see code on the slides!

I’d also like to let people know that in Boston, CINF will be running an experimental symposium consisting of several very short (5 minutes or 8 minutes) lightning talks. But unlike traditional ACS symposia, we’re going to open submissions to this symposia sometime in July and close about 3 or 2 weeks before the meeting itself. In other words, we’re going to be looking for recent and ongoing developments in chemical information and cheminformatics. The title and exact mechanics of this symposium – dates, submissions, reviews and the actual times, slide counts will be announced in the near future at various places. If you think the early ACS deadlines suck, consider submitting a short talk to this symposium.

Overall an excellent meeting in San Francisco and I’m already looking forward to Boston. But in the meantime, time to get back to chewing on data, and finishing up some papers, book chapters and talks.