ABACBS 2025 Workshops
Workshops are a core part of the ABACBS annual meeting, and 2025 will be no exception. This year, sessions will be held at Flinders University’s Festival Plaza venue in the heart of the Adelaide CBD (right by the train station) on Thursday 27th and Friday 28th of November.
This year we are developing our workshop timetable around flexible 90 minute blocks with a goal of running three to four workshops side-by-side so that attendees can curate their own program. If you’d like to run a session, show a demo, or dive deep into your favourite topic with Australia’s bioinformaticians, send us an expression of interest (EOI) by Friday 1st August 2025. Workshops can run for 1 (90 minutes), 2 (3 hours), or 4 (6 hours) consecutive blocks — it’s up to you. Thanks to Pawsey, we are also able to offer infrastructure support for workshops. We will notify of workshop EOI outcomes by August 21st
For attendees, the workshop schedule will be announced on September 2nd and will be via the conference registration portal (the early bird registration rate will be available until September 26th).
What we can offer organisers:
Compute – we’ll provision a classroom set of VMs and help you containerise / deploy your environment.
Workshop pack & dry-run – advice, templates and best practices to help you - plus a scheduled rehearsal with guinea pigs a week early (online) to make sure everything works on the day.
Flexible blocks – sessions are 90 min each. Pick 1, 2, or 4 contiguous blocks (1.5 h, 3 h, or 6 h total). See below for an
Anticipated themes
Below are broadly how we anticipate workshops will be organised. However, if you would like to propose a topic that falls outside of these themes please let us know. We are eager to work with the community to develop an exciting program.
BioCAsia, R and Bioconductor development including tutorials, new packages, building packages.
Advanced Sequencing and Structural Variation including long reads, SV/CNV calling and annotation
Metagenomics & Microbiome analyses including multi-omics integration and new techniques.
Scalable Workflows & Compute Infrastructure including data management, testing, Snakemake/Nextflow, cloud/HPC.
AI and Machine Learning in Genomics including LLMs, practical ML pipelines and predictive models
Single-Cell & Spatial Omics including applying novel analysis techniques, workflows or interpreting data.
Professional Bioinformatics including generative AI and production deployments.
What to include in your EOI for hosting a workshop:
Workshop title & 1-paragraph abstract – what problem does it solve and what will participants do?
Organiser(s) – names, affiliations, and the person we should contact.
Duration – 1, 2, or 4 blocks.
Target numbers – how many laptops you want to fit in a room (25 – 60 typical) / how many seats
Compute requests – CPU/GPU needs, special datasets, software etc. This information will be shared to participants ahead of time.
Preferred theme / day – so we can slot everything logically. Please advise clearly if you are unavailable to present on either day or have other restrictions
Send EOIs (plain text or PDF) to conference@abacbs.org by August 1st, 2025.
The outcome of workshop submissions will be announced by August 21st, 2025.
Got questions about compute, room setup, or anything else? Email conference@abacbs.org email and we can help.
Looking forward to your innovative, interactive workshop ideas!
