PyCon AU / University of Queensland

Software Carpentry's mission is to help scientists and engineers become more productive by teaching them basic lab skills for computing like program design, version control, data management, and task automation. This two-day hands-on bootcamp will cover basic concepts and tools; participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

Instructors: Damien Irving, Philipp Bayer, Tim McNamara

Who: The course is aimed at postgraduate students, post-docs and other researchers who have a basic familiarity with programming concepts like loops, conditionals, and arrays, but need help to translate this knowledge into practical tools to help them work more productively. We particularly encourage researchers attending PyCon Australia to extend their stay in order to participate in the bootcamp.

Where: Boardroom, St. Leo's College, St. Lucia, Brisbane. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps. The room is the Boardroom, St. Leo's College, on the campus of the University of Queensland. This map circles the location.

Requirements: Participants are asked to bring a laptop with some specific software packages installed (see Setup instructions below). If you don't have a laptop, that's completely fine. We'll pair you up with someone who does.

Click here for more info and to register

2014 Winter School in Mathematical & Computational Biology

The 2014 Winter School in Mathematical & Computational Biology will be held from 7-11 July 2014 at Queensland Bioscience Precinct, on the St Lucia campus of The University of Queensland.

The themes of this year’s Winter School are:

• Next-generation sequencing & bioinformatics
• Modelling from high-throughput bio-data
• Big data, statistics and applications
• Molecular phylogenetics

This year we have presenters from top universities and research institutes across Australasia (Auckland, Dunedin, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney) and from France, Germany and USA. All presenters are recognised authorities who will make their topic accessible to and exciting for non-specialists and specialists alike.

Registration is now open to 2 July 2014

• Early bird registration runs until 22 June 2014
• Full price registration runs from 23 June to 2 July 2014
• Click here to register...

Student travel bursaries close 30 May 2014

The Australian Bioinformatics Network (which is funded by CSIRO, Bioplatforms Australia and EMBL Australia) is  pleased to offer a limited number of competitive travel bursaries to undergraduate and postgraduate students to participate in the 2014 Winter School

• Applications open: 19 May 2014
• Applications close: Friday 30 May 2014
• Notification of outcome: Tuesday 10 June 2014
• Click here apply...

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...please send an email to: [email protected]

See you in Brisbane!

Training: Extended RNA-Seq Analysis - QFAB

Discover the techniques of RNA-Seq analysis, including differential expression analysis, graphical data summaries, de novo transcriptome assembly and gene-list enrichment analysis.

Use the Galaxy bioinformatics platform, the command line interface and a selection of other resources to create a complete RNA-Seq analysis workflow.

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Training: Variant Detection using Galaxy

This workshop will cover the concepts of detecting small variants, including SNPs and small indels, from next-generation sequencing data. Using Galaxy, a platform which provides a user-friendly interface to bioinformatics tools, Mark Crowe from QFAB will introduce the tools, data types and workflow of variant detection analysis. An optional afternoon session will cover more advanced topics, including the use of statistically-based variant detection approaches and functional annotation of variants, along with practice exercises.

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An Introduction to Statistics for Biologists

In this hands-on workshop, QFAB Senior Statistician Kim-Anh Le Cao will introduce fundamental concepts in statistical modelling, inference and data analysis, and how to use them in the analysis of biological data. Participants will use the freely available “R” software to learn how to apply common statistical tests or methodologies to real problems in biology.

By the end of this course, attendees will be able to:

• Understand basic statistical concepts
• Perform statistical tests to answer simple to more complex biological questions
• Mine and explore biological data sets
• Perform statistical analysis on medium to large scale data sets
• Be able to use the R statistical programming language as a data analysis too

Click to read  more...