In May the Ensembl team will again provide a 3-day Ensembl Perl API workshop on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, United Kingdom. Although this workshop is primarily meant for campus employees, external participants are also more than welcome to attend.

The workshop itself is free of cost. You should note though that our campus is located a bit in the middle of nowhere and that you have to make your own arrangements for accommodation and/or travel. A similar workshop will be given again end of the year at the University of Cambridge (27-29 November 2013).

For more information and to register please mail me (bert@ebi.ac.uk).

3-DAY ENSEMBL API WORKSHOP
Time: 22-24 May 2013, 9:30-17:00
Place: Teaching room, EBI, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK
Instructors: Magali Ruffier, Thomas Juettemann, Anja Thormann, Matthieu Muffato, Javier Herrero
Cost: none

The Ensembl project provides a comprehensive and integrated source of annotation of mainly vertebrate genome sequences. This 3-day workshop is aimed at researchers and developers interested in exploring Ensembl beyond the website. The workshop covers the core, compara, variation and functional genomics (regulation) databases and APIs. For each of these the database schema and the API design as well as its most important objects and their methods will be presented. This will be followed by practical sessions in which the participants can put the learned into practice by writing their own Perl scripts.

Important
This workshop is NOT intended to teach you either Perl or basic molecular biological and genetic concepts! To be able to attend you should be able to code in Perl and be familiar with basic molecular biology and genetics. A basic knowledge of Ensembl is advantageous.

The Ensembl Outreach team is currently looking into the possibility of giving browser and / or API workshops in the Western US in 2013. Ideally, this would be after the Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego (12-16 January), so in the second half of January.

Our workshops are highly interactive and consist of presentations alternated with lots of hands-on exercises. The ideal group size is between 20-30 participants for a browser workshop and between 10-20 participants for an API workshop.

We don’t charge academic institutions any fee for our workshops, but we expect the host to pay for our instructor’s expenses (i.e. accommodation, domestic travel and subsistence).

If you are potentially interested in hosting a workshop or want more information, please contact me at bert@ebi.ac.uk.

Bert Overduin
Ensembl Outreach

We still have some places available at our Ensembl API workshop that will be given from Wednesday 21 until Friday 23 March 2012 at the University of Cambridge.

Description:

This 3-day workshop is aimed at researchers and developers interested in exploring Ensembl beyond the website. The workshop covers the core, compara, variation and functional genomics (regulation) databases and APIs. For each of these the database schema and the API design as well as its most important objects and their methods will be presented. This will be followed by practical sessions in which the participants can put the learned into practice by writing their own Perl scripts. There are no costs for the workshop.

Prerequisites:

This workshop is NOT intended to teach you either Perl or molecular biological and genetic concepts! To be able to attend you should be able to code in Perl and be familiar with basic molecular biology and genetics. A basic knowledge of Ensembl is advantageous.

Schedule:

Wednesday 21 March 2012:

09:30 – 14:30: Core API (Kieron Taylor)
14:30 – 17:00: Functional Genomics API (Nathan Johnson)

Thursday 22 March 2012:

09:30 – 11:30: Functional Genomics API (Nathan Johnson)
11:30 – 17:00: Variation API (Will McLaren)

Friday 23 March 2012:

09:30 – 17:00: Compara API (Matthieu Muffato / Stephen Fitzgerald)

Registration:

You can register for the workshop here.

The Ensembl Outreach team is looking into the possibility to give browser and/or API workshops in the US West and Midwest in 2012. For academic institutions these workshops would be free of charge, but we would expect hosts to reimburse our travel, accomodation and subsistence expenses. Browser workshops are typically one day, API workshops can be one or more days. The ideal group size is around 20 participants. If you are potentially interested to host a workshop or want more information, please contact Bert Overduin.

The Ensembl Outreach team is currently looking into the possibility of giving some 1-day Ensembl browser workshops in the North Eastern US (New England and NY area) in the second half of November 2011. Academic institutions would only have to pay the instructor’s expenses (i.e. accommodation and subsistence) and the domestic travel costs, but we would not otherwise charge for the workshops. The possibility of a 1-day API workshop, covering the core and variation APIs, is also discussable.

For more information about our workshops, please have a look here.

Interested? Please contact me for more details at bert@ebi.ac.uk.

The Ensembl Outreach team is pleased to offer a 1-day workshop “Browsing the Human Genome” as a satellite to the European Human Genetics Conference 2011 that is held from 28-31 May in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This workshop will cover the Ensembl and Vega genome browsers as well as BioMart, with a focus on variation. The workshop will be held on Friday 27 May at the VU University Amsterdam and is free of charge for conference registrants. Places are limited to 20 participants. More details on the workshop and how to register can be found here.

Instead of the monthly blog post with Ensembl workshops for the coming month, upcoming workshops will from now on be posted on the Calendar, that can be found under ‘Workshops’ in the black menu bar.

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!

All Ensembl events for 2010 are done …. but we already have lined up quite a few for 2011!

Here are the ones for January:

16 Jan: Demo at the Plant and Animal Genome XIX Conference, San Diego, CA, US
18 Jan: Ensembl module in Primers for Predocs, Hinxton, UK
18-19 Jan: Ensembl module in the Workshop on Comparative Genomics, Europe 2011, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic
20-21 Jan: Ensembl module in the EBI workshop at City of Hope, Duarte, CA, US
21 Jan: Developers workshop at the Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands
24 Jan: Browser workshop at the UCSC Genome Browser Group, Santa Cruz, CA, US
26 Jan: Developers workshop at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, US
27 Jan: Browser workshop at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, US
27 Jan: Browser workshop at The University of Nottingham, UK

For details about these and other upcoming events, please have a look at the complete list of Ensembl training events.