The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is a geographically distributed virtual community of shared resources offering tremendous potential to advance the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
BIRN enhances the scientific discoveries of biomedical scientists and clinical researchers across research disciplines.
BIRN ...
* hosts a collaborative environment rich with tools that permit uniform access to hundreds of researchers, enabling cooperation on multi-institutional investigations.
* synchronizes developments in wide area networking, multiple data sources, and distributed computing.
* designs, tests, and releases new integrative software tools that enable researchers to pose questions and share knowledge across multiple animal models (mouse, human, and non-human primate).
* receives funding from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), established in 2001.
This project, funded for two years starting September 2008 by the NSF Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) Program will develop a suite of tools and services to encourage formation of virtual organizations in scientific communities of various sizes, such as conference groups and departmental research groups, and allow such organizations to filter out relevant documents from various input streams, select and enhance the quality of bibliographic data associated with the organization, and attract students, teachers and researchers to contribute to activity of the organization.
Pre- and Post-Conference Virtual Sessions
for the 2008 IIIS' Conferences
The Organizing Committees of 2008 IIIS' conferences decided to implement pre- and post-Conference virtual sessions for the 2008 IIIS' Conferences. This decision was based on the experiment, related to this kind of virtual sessions, done in the 2006 IIIS' conferences; on some of the suggestions that 2006 conversational sessions generated, and on the survey made among the participants of these conferences. Each pre- and post-conference virtual session will be associated, in one-to-one relationship, to each face-to-face session of the conference.