CMSB 2019, Trieste, Italy

This year in September, I participated the 17th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology (CMSB 2019) in the Department of Mathematics and Informatics of University of Trieste in Italy. I had a poster presentation about our contribution Barbaric Robustness Monitoring Revisited for STL* in Parasim.

Travelling & sightseeing

I travelled to Trieste by bus from Brno through Vienna. The trip took about 10 hours. I was accompanied by my colleague Matej, who was also headed to the conference. The journey went smoothly; we had only a minimal delay. I managed to use the time spent in the bus for working.

In Trieste I had booked a hotel, which was very close to the bus station. It took me only 5 minutes to get there.

Except attendance to the conference I had only a little time for sightseeing. I have seen the city centre with multiple squares and nice buildings, the coast which was mostly occupied by the harbour and several piers with a nice view of the sea.

We had two social events included in the conference. The first one was in Caffè degli Specchi located on Piazza Unità d’Italia (a square). It was a nice place to discuss research with other participants with some finger food and pasta.

The second social event was in a fish restaurant Pier the roof located on a pier with a terrace by the sea. However, since it was very windy, we couldn’t enjoy the terrace. The dinner had several courses. All meals were based on some seafood which was very delicious.

Finally, the last day we had a free afternoon, so I went to San Giusto Castle with a nice exhibition and spectacular view on most of the city.

Photos are also accessible here.

Conference highlights

All sessions took place in lecture room 3B, building H3, University of Trieste. In the hall in front of the room, poster session and coffee breaks were happening.

The program was filled with several invited talks and contribution talks and poster flash talk session. The full program can be found here.

For me the most interesting thought from the invited talks was by Manuel Zimmer, when he was talking about mutations in genome and immune response to cancer cells. The interesting point was that the cancerous cell might develop a mutation which will cause recognition by immunity and consequent death of the cell. They would like to detect such cases and develop cures which would induce such a mutation. However, it is very hard to measure such events since once the cell’s genome mutated enough, it is almost immediately killed.

From the contributed talks, the most relevant one was by Eugenia Oshurko about KAMIStudio: an environment for biocuration of cellular signalling knowledge. This work is very similar to our ongoing research in the lab. Even though the are some differences: they are focused on protein interactions, instead of model mapping they develop models by instantiating their knowledge base (so-called corpus); they use rule-based modelling approach (Kappa language) annotated by links to ontologies (UniProt). In their next steps. they want to employ versioning, static analysis etc. The overall goal is very similar to ours.

During the poster sessions and also other coffee breaks, we had a lot of discussion at our displayed poster in the hall.