Call for Tutorial proposals

Please note that the submissions deadline has passed. The call for Tutorials is closed.

The ECCB2022 scientific committee invites proposals of 3 hour tutorials to be part of the New Trends in Bioinformatics by ECCB programme. The tutorials will run virtually from the 12th to the 16th of September 2022 and in face-to-face format on the 18th of September 2022, immediately preceding the 21st European Conference on Computational Biology in Sitges (Barcelona, Spain).

Tutorials serve an educational function and are expected to provide a balanced perspective on a field of research. They should not focus on the instructors’ own research and/or resources, unless balanced with other resources in the same domain. However, tutorials on broadly used bioinformatics tools, resources and/or services will be considered.

This call is an invitation for scientists and professionals working in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology to submit proposals for high quality tutorials for ECCB2022. Some attractive topics include (but not limited to them):

• Analysis of long read-sequencing data.
• AI and machine learning for bioinformatics.
• Reuse, develop and share biological visualisation techniques.
• Single-cell RNA, DNA and/or protein analysis.
• Translational informatics: opportunities for bioinformatics in the clinical realm.
• Assembly of genomes in metagenomics.
• Scientific workflows for analysing, integrating and scaling bioinformatics data.
• Protein evolution analysis: on the use of phylogenetic trees.
• How to make your software sustainable and reusable for open access or commercial usage.

Tutorials held in previous editions can be found here: ECCB2018 and ECCB2016.

Tue, 25 January 2022	Call for Tutorial proposals open
Thu, 17 February 2022	Submission deadline for Tutorial proposals
Thu, 24 Feb 2022	Extended submission deadline for Tutorial proposals
Wed, 30 March 2022	Acceptance notification for Tutorials
Wed, 1 June 2022	Detailed schedule with speakers online
Fri, 1 July 2022	Complete Tutorials program online
12 – 16 September 2022	Virtual Tutorials days at ECCB2022
Sun, 18 September 2022	Face-to-face Tutorials day at ECCB2022

The tutorial proposals should not exceed 4 pages and must include the following information:

• Detailed description of the tutorial (including title and abstract, motivation, learning outcomes, and level taught).
• Provisional schedule – include draft talk titles or draft content to be covered in each section.
• Intended audience and possible prerequisites.
• Maximum number of attendees participating.
• Material or infrastructure required (if relevant).
• Preferred day and time slot/s. From the 12th to the 16th of September the time slots available will be (i) from 13:30h to 16:30h and (ii) from 17h to 20h (CEST time zone). On the 18th of September the time slots available will be (i) from 9h to 12:30h and (ii) from 13:30h to 17h (CEST time zone).   
• Preferred delivery format: virtual, face-to-face, no preference  – elaborate your answer. In the case of preferring to deliver in face-to-face format: the slots for face-to-face tutorial sessions will be limited. Please indicate if you would accept delivering your tutorial virtually in case of not being assigned to a face-to-face slot.
• A brief CV of the instructor(s) showing your affiliation, relevant qualifications and teaching experience.
• Contact information of the instructor(s).

We recommend registering two instructors per tutorial. Depending on the number of attendees, it might be possible to add in one or two helpers.

An evaluation committee will consider the following criteria in assessing proposals: relevance to the ECCB2022 attendees, educational experience of the instructors, effectiveness and completeness of the proposed approach, overlap with tutorials held in previous editions, as well as the overall clarity and quality of the proposal. The committee will also promote a gender-balanced representation of instructors in the New Trends in Bioinformatics by ECCB programme.

Please note that tutorial participants often consider the presenters’ reputations and standing when choosing particular sessions. It is consequently expected that the presenters listed on the submitted proposal will present their tutorials live.

Please save your proposals in PDF format and send them through EasyChair using the following link: (submission closed)

The tutorial sessions will take place virtually from the 12th to the 16th of September 2022 and in face-to-face format on the 18th of September. ECCB2022 will help with the administrative aspects of facilitating the streaming and online participation platforms, assigning rooms, making announcements, providing technical advising service to better design the tutorial, and publishing the detailed schedule in the conference program. The instructors of the virtual tutorials will be asked to attend a technical rehearsal session in the days prior to the tutorial and will count on the support of a technician during the streaming of their session. All the instructors selected for the face-to-face sessions are expected to deliver their talk in person from the venue of the conference.

The virtual tutorial fees will be used to cover the costs for the streaming and online participation services, whereas the registration fees for the face-to-face tutorials will serve to rent the room, provide the rooms’ technical equipment, coffee breaks catering and lunch. For each accepted virtual tutorial, up to two instructors will receive free access to the complete virtual programme of New Trends in Bioinformatics by ECCB (subject to the same registration guidelines that apply to the rest of participants). For each tutorial selected for the face-to-face sessions that will run on the 18th of September, up to two instructors will be granted free passes to the rest of the New Trends in Bioinformatics by ECCB sessions during that day. In the case of registering helpers, up to two helpers per tutorial will have free access to the session where they participate. The names of the instructors and helpers who receive free passes will have to be registered in the programme of their session.

The training and reference materials used during the tutorials will be made available for download from the ECCB2022 website. If such material includes slides and docx documents, the instructors should provide them in PDF format. The instructors will be asked to send the final material and linked repositories containing documentation and exercises, as well as a description of the technical setup and software specifications required for the tutorial to eccb2022@bcocongresos.com before the 2nd of September 2022. We encourage the instructors to prepare their reference material with as much attention as possible to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). 

The tutorials’ instructors are expected to operate within the context of the ECCB2022 procedures, including finalising the program and providing all the relevant materials by the deadlines, working in agreement with the ECCB2022 copyright statement and following the Code of Conduct. ECCB2022 reserves the right to cancel a scheduled tutorial if by July 29th the number of registered participants to the session is less than 20.

For more information please contact the technical secretariat: eccb2022@bcocongresos.com

The virtual tutorial sessions are scheduled on the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th of September 2022 from 13:30h to 20:00h (CEST). On the 18th of September the tutorials will run face-to-face in the venue of the ECCB2022 in Sitges (Barcelona, Spain). Each day there will be two 3-hour slots accommodating up to two tutorials running in parallel.

Time (CEST)	Details
13:30 – 16:30	Tutorials slot I (x2 Tutorials)
16:30 – 17:00	Break between Tutorials
17:00 – 20:00	Tutorials slot II (x2 Tutorials)

Time (CEST)	Details
09:00 – 10:30	Tutorials slot I – Part 1 (x2 Tutorials)
10:30 – 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30	Tutorials slot I – Part 2 (x2 Tutorials)
12:30 – 13:30	Lunch Break
13:30 – 15:00	Tutorials slot II – Part 1 (x2 Tutorials)
15:00 – 15:30	Coffee break
13:30 – 17:00	Tutorials slot II – Part 2 (x2 Tutorials)

The tutorial registration fees will be published in the next few weeks. 

The virtual tutorial fees will be used to cover the costs for the streaming and online participation services. As for the registration in the face-to-face tutorial sessions, the fees will serve to provide the rooms rent, equipment, coffee breaks and lunch.

Note that instructors are responsible for ensuring that the material they submit for downloading may be legally used, and that appropriate copyright permissions have been obtained. The instructors will grant distribution and reproduction rights of the tutorial materials to ECCB2022 from proposal acceptance through December 2022, and they agree that their materials may be made available in any form by the conference to the participants of ECCB2022.

If the instructors choose to grant publishing permission of the recording of their session to the ECCB2022, the tutorial sessions will be filmed on video and made available to all the attendees through the virtual platform. Unless stated otherwise, the videos will be published in the ISCB.tv Youtube public channel from the 1st of January 2023. The instructors who choose to give their consent to the ECCB2022 for the publication of the recorded session will do it under the most updated Creative Commons License (CC-BY 4.0).

For more information please contact the technical secretariat: eccb2022@bcocongresos.com