About
The International Conference on Bioinformatics is a conference series first started in Bangkok, Thailand in 2002. Since then, the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) has adopted this conference and grown the conference to become one of Asia’s oldest and largest conferences on bioinformatics, with special focus on bioinformatics amongst life scientists.
In 2005, InCoB was part of a festival of international events on bioinformatics called BIOINFO’2005 in Busan, South Korea, where the meeting of the Association for Asian Societies for Bioinformatics (AASBi) also took place.
InCoB was one of the first conferences to publish our top conference papers in international peer-reviewed impact-factored journals such as the BMC BioMed Central family of journals starting in InCoB 2006, Delhi India.
The Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network of bioinformatics practitioners throughout Asia, the Pacific and beyond, has teamed up with local national bioinformatics organisers each year to mount InCoB with every greater success.
In InCoB 2007 Hong Kong, live sessions were narrow-casted to Hanoi to enable the region’s developing country budding bioinformatics researchers to have a chance to take part and learn from others.
In InCoB 2008 Taipei, we partnered the FAOBMB (Federation of Asian Oceanian Biochemists and Molecular Biologists) in running special bioinformatics workshops.
In InCoB 2009 Singapore, we were the first to feature a Nobel Laureate keynote speaker. In addition, InCoB was able to launch an APBioNet initiative on Minimum Information About a Bioinformatics Investigation (MIABI).
By InCoB 2010 Tokyo, Japan, we were having multiple journals featuring our top papers in multiple tracks. To date, we have our top papers published in several journals including BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Genomics, Immunome Research, IPSJ Transactions and Bioinformation. This year was the year we launched the BioDB100 initiative, which is the aim of gathering 100 bioinformatics databases which are MIABI-standards compliant under one interoperable framework.
In InCoB 2011, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, APBioNet had the singular honour of having successfully won the bid for the 10th InCoB Conference designated the 1st ISCB Asia Joint Conference 2011, having clinched the honour amidst tough competition from the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), with whom APBioNet has been affiliated for years. We organized this conference in collaboration with the International Immunomics Society (IIMMS) and the Malaysian Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (MaSBiC). We continued our tradition of peer-reviewed publications in BMC Genomics, BMC Bioinformatics, Immunome Research, and Bioinformation. The BioDB100 project was launched, and APBioNet collaborated with the International Society for Biocuration (ISB) and BioSharing on BioDBCore standards. Sponsored by the SEA-EU-Net project under FP7 of the European Commission, and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI), the satellite meeting “EU-ASEAN Scientific Workshop on Computational Biology” was successful in supporting bilateral scientific resaerch and development initiatives between EU and ASEAN (28-29th November 2011).
In the 11th InCoB 2012 Bangkok, Thailand, we saw the InCoB return to its spawning ground, celebrating the tenth anniversary of its formation, hosted by National Science and technology Development Agency (NSTDA), the umbrella organization overseeing the previous hosts of InCoB2002, National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC) as well as King Mongkut’s University of Technology (KMUTT), one of nine National Research Universities in Thailand and an education pioneer in the field of Systems Biology and Bioinformatics. This event was endorsed by the ASEAN Committee on Science and Technology (COST).
For 2013, InCoB was organised in Taicang, China (between Suzhou and Shanghai), in conjunction with the 2nd International Conference on Translational Biomedical Informatics (ICTBI 2013), with the theme: “Biomedical Informatics in the Big Data Era: Data-Driven Biology and Medicine”
In 2014, InCoB travelled to Brighton Beach, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. This became the first time we headed down south in the second decade of InCoB, and the co-location of InCoB 2014 with the International Biophysics Congress 2014, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, Brisbane, Australia, 3rd – 7th August 2014 www.iupab2014.org.
InCoB 2015 saw the first time we partnered and co-located with Asia’s oldest bioinformatics workshop, the GIW Genome Informatics Workshop 2015. This joint event was successfully held at the Odiaba, Tokyo, Japan.
InCoB 2016 returned to Singapore again, co-organised by the Bioinformatics Institute of A*STAR and the Association for Medical and Bio Informatics Singapore (AMBIS) in September 2016 at Matrix Building, Biopolis, Singapore.
InCoB 2017 had made its presence again in China after four years. It was hosted by Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University and supported by University of Technology Sydney, ISCB, Taihe Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Anhui University of Technology and APBioNet.
InCoB2018 hosted in New Delhi from 26-28 September 2018 was organised by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi was attended by more than 350 people, which included students, faculty members, paid and waived registrants. Participants came from a dozen odd countries across continents.
The 18th InCoB was co-organised by Universitas YARSI and APBioNet. The conference was co-located with three major events: The Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training (GOBLET) Annual General Meeting (AGM), The 8th Southeast Asia Pharmacogenomics Research Network (SEAPharm) Meeting and the 2nd Genomic Medicine Conference (GMC). The range of events took place from September 9-12, 2019 at Universitas YARSI, Jakarta, Indonesia.