The Second Annual General Meeting of the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) will be held at the Pacific Symposium for Biocomputing PSB'99 on Big Island, Hawaii, in January 1999.
Theme
Expanding the activities of the nascent Asia-Pacific
Bioinformatics Network (APBionet)
At the Jan 98 PSB Symposium in Hawaii, several founding member countries came together and endorsed a charter creating an Asia Pacifc Bioinformatics Network (APBionet) for fostering more scientific interaction in bioinformatics around the Pacific Rim. The mission of the organization is amongst other things is to
The overall hope that this body will speak as a unified voice for AP regional bioinformatics has shown promise in that APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) has recently endorsed us as the official Bioinformatics forum for the region, approved our joint advanced networking project with the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) consortium.
Since the recent inception, more than a dozen other organisations in other AP Countries have expressed interest in joining the group and a number of training workshops and conferences have been conducted by members at the host country's bioinformatics center.
A web-site and active email-news groups and periodic news updates have also been started.
Given the promising progress to date, the need for representatives from APBionet member countries - old, new and those wishing to join - to gather again to discuss plans for taking the nascent group to a higher level of organized activity is clear. To this end, a special workshop session at the upcoming PSB meeting has been offered by the organizers and has been accepted by the founding APBionet members for the next Annual General Meeting of APBioNet.
This is a call to all APBionet member country representatives and all other interested parties to come up to PSB 99 in January at Hawaii. Aloha !