This week, I have attended the BIBM 2022 (IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine) conference online. I will give a brief report about this conference, although I did not have time to attend many sessions.
BIBM 2022 was held from the 6th to 8th December 2022 in Las Vegas, USA and from Changsha, China. However, due to the COVID situation, attendance in Changsha has been changed to online attendance.
BIBM is an international conference for bioinformatics. Interestingly, it has been held for over 15 years while being most of the times organized either in USA or China.
A bilingual conference
BIBM is actually held partly in English and partly in Chinese. Some sessions from USA were completely in English while some session from China are completely in Chinese. But authors from USA and China could in theory watch the talks from the other location. Talks from USA could be watched using Zoom, while talks from Changsha could be watched using Tencent Meetings.
Proceedings of BIBM
The proceedings of the BIBM conference are published by IEEE. These proceedings contain regular papers, workshop papers as well as poster papers. It will be interesting for some authors that all these papers are published in the same proceedings.
The proceedings were quite large with numerous papers. It was a PDF file of over 1 GB and over 3900 pages! Luckily, the Edge browser of Windows on my computer can open such large file without problem. B
This year, there was also a good range of workshops to choose from, with over 25 workshops hosted at BIBM. So even if a paper was not accepted as regular paper, there was a good choice of workshop to choose from for publishing a paper.
Day 1 – Opening ceremony and first keynote in Las Vegas
On the first day, I stayed up late (until 1:30AM) to watch the conference opening in the USA, which was in the US. Unfortunately, there was some technical problem at the conference site in Las Vegas and we could not hear anything during the first maybe 45 minutes. The sound came back during the first keynote, which was about bioinformatics. Due to the technical problem I did not get much information from the opening. I will try to get the slides from the opening and update this post later with the information.
Day 1 – Opening ceremony and first keynote in Changsha
Then, after waking up, I attended the second opening ceremony for people attending from Changsha China that gave also some general information about the conference. The opening and the following keynote talks from that session were given in Chinese.
The opening was explained that some part of the registration fee will be refunded to attendees as the conference is online, which is good news. The details will be explained after the conference.
And also, from what I understood, a best paper award was announced.
Below, I show some pictures from the opening in Changsha. There was a lot of attendees (over 250 at some point!).
And here are a few slides from the first keynote on “Brain imaging pattern recognition methods and imaging representation of mental disorders” by Huafu Chen, which had some interesting content.
A second keynote was by Min Li about “Computational solutions to explore genomic 3D organization. Here are a few slides:
An interesting paper on sequential patterns for insurance claims
I also noticed a very interesting paper on utilizing sequential patterns with the CM-SPAM algorithm and periodic patterns with the LPP-Growth algorithm to analyze courses of medical treatment to obtain insights about anomalous insurance claims.
Kemp, J., Barker, C., Good, N., Bain, M. (2022) Sequential pattern detection for identifying courses of treatment and anomalous claim behaviour in medical insurance. Proc. of BIBM 2022.
That is a cool topic and a real application. Using the periodic patterns and sequential patterns, previously unknown anomalous claim patterns were found, which confirmed previously suspected anomalous claim pattern. Authors said that up to $486,617.60 in potentially recoverable costs were identified and a benefit of using a pattern mining approach is interpretability.
Analyzing COVID protein structures
My research team also published a paper about the analysis and classification of protein structures from COVID-19. You may read the paper below:
Nawaz, S., Fournier-Viger, P, He, Y. (2022). S-PDB: Analysis and Classification of SARS-COV2 Spike Protein Structures. HPC4COVID-19 workshop at IEEE BIBM 2022, to appear.
Registration fee
Although the program of the BIBM conference is good, the registration fee of BIBM is I would say very expensive at 985 USD to publish a single paper. I think this is the main drawback that I see from this conference, which would make me think twice about publishing there again (since some conferences are much cheaper). But with the refund due to the conference being online (which is expected to be around 300 USD), the price is now more reasonable.
Next year: BIBM 2023
It was announced that BIBM 2023 will be held in Istanbul, Turkey. That is a nice location.
Conclusion
This was a short blog post to talk about the BIBM 2022 conference, which I have attended. Hope it is interesting.
