Back from ACS San Francisco Meeting 2010

Last week I co-hosted a symposium with Noel O'Boyle and Andrew Lang on "Visual Analysis of Chemical Data" at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco (March 22-23, 2010). The ACS recorded almost every talk in our symposium and I'll provide the link here when available (they tell me mid April).

Liz Dorland kicked off the symposium with a great keynote presentation covering effective visualization in a number of fields and the special challenges faced in chemistry. There were several talks about QSAR and I particularly enjoyed Edmund Chapness who incorporated the visualization of confidence in predictions with an intuitive colored molecule map. Geoff Hutchison gave an informative overview of Avogadro.

Perhaps the biggest revelation was the "iTunes for Cheminformatics" project by NIH researcher Ajit Jadhav (leading the team which includes Rajarshi Guha). The alpha version will be available for testing on April 5, 2010 and many of us are eagerly anticipating being able to give it a spin. From what I understand the system will automatically be able to identify scaffolds (fragments) in a collection of molecules and make it easy to search for and filter assay results.

Carmen Drahl covered in minute by minute detail announcements about new drug candidates on Twitter. Following the FriendFeed feed for the conference flagged a very interesting post about a Cold Fusion Symposium that was being held. In spite of the notorious lack of wireless availability at ACS conferences, attendees seem to be making due with accessing their social networks via their cell phone devices.

Andrew Lang and I spoke about Visualizing Chemistry in Second Life - our slides are here - hopefully I'll be able to post the recordings as well soon.

Visualizing Chemistry in Second Life ACS SP2010

View more presentations from Jean-Claude Bradley.