November 6-9 saw the largest ever annual Cytoscape Public Symposium hosted for the first time in Europe by the Human Genetics Department of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam. With over 300 attendees the Symposium was fully booked. The Application Showcase the day before the Symposium draw an attendance of 150 working their way through separate tracks of application showcases, tutorials and developers coding sessions.

We're now gathering the presentations and tutorials that were given during the retreat and we will do our best to make these available through this website. Keep an eye on the announcement/discuss maillists for that. The conference booklet will be made available also.

Hope to see you all at next year's retreat that will be held in Toronto, July 2008.

The Public Symposium entitled Integrative Bioinformatics: At the cutting edge of network analysis and biological data integration had a formidable list of speakers, among them:

• Keynote speaker: Leroy Hood; Institute of Systems Biology, Seattle, USA.
  President of the Institute of Systems Biology. Winner of the Lasker and Kyoto prizes.
• Chris Sander; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA.
  Director of the Computational Biology Center at the MSKCC.
• Ewan Birney; European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK.
  Head of the European Bioinformatics Institute's Ensembl project.
• Ruedi Aebersold; Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland.
  Professor at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology.
• Trey Ideker; University of California, San Diego, USA.
  Laboratory for Integrative Network Biology at the University of California, San Diego.
• Peter Sorger; Harvard, Boston, USA.
  Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.
• Benno Schwikowski; Institute Louis Pasteur, Paris, France.
  Director of the Systems Biology Group at the Louis Pasteur Institute.
• Andrew Hopkins; Pfizer Global Research & Development, Sandwich, Kent, UK.
  Head of knowledge discovery at Pfizer Global R&D.

Abstracts of their talks and resumes of the Speakers can be found here
In addition, the Cytoscape community organizes a developers retreat each year to establish a roadmap for Cytoscape development. Attendees of the symposium may also be interested in Demo Day and Cytoscape Tutorials on Nov 7th.
The goal of the retreat is threefold:

1. Establish a development roadmap for the next year
2. Involve the large user community in Europe in Cytoscape development
3. Gather user feedback and use it to plan future development.

We want to reach these goals in a retreat spanning four days. The first and last day (6 and 9 November)are mainly intended for the Cytoscape core development team and other developers who write their own Cytoscape plugins. The second and third days are aimed at a wide audience of molecular biologists and bioinformaticians in the Netherlands, Europe and internationally.