Computational Evolution Group

Conference report: New Zealand Phylogenetics Meeting
Feb 10-15, Whitianga’08

I attended my first New Zealand Phylogenetics Meeting, an annual event that rotates between several beautiful locations. This year it was in Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula, hosted by University of Auckland. The conference was different in several ways from others I have attended. It accepts a maximum of about 50 attendees. I don’t think that it is by invitation only, but it fills up so quickly that the effect is the same: If you are not on the grapevine when the initial call for registration goes out, you will not get in. As a result, the quality of the talks are uniformly high, and this year was no exception. Just about everyone who attends presents a paper. There were no parallel tracks, so nobody had to miss a talk. There was plenty of time to interact with everyone during long lunch breaks and even one whole day for enjoying the location, yet everyone was able to give a 20 to 30 minute presentation.

The broad range of topics included computer science (algorithms and computational complexity), combinatorial mathematics, as well as topics more directly part of theoretical and applied phylogenetics. My take on the presentations will be a bit skewed by my non-phylogenetics compsci background, but you can see all the abstracts for yourself in the Whitianga08 Conference Programme [PDF].

I particularly enjoyed the more mathematical presentations that were concentrated in the first morning sessions of the first two days. The good dose of algorithmic complexity and combinatorics with my morning coffee helped me deal with the post-morning tea phylogenetic studies of snails, birds, and plants. I’m sure some biologists in the group appreciated the chance to sleep through those first talks. Actually, one remarkable aspect of the conference was how accessible the talks were to people outside of their specific areas of study.

One of my favourites was the conference opener by Mike Steel, The joys of being mean on remarkable simplifications to some complex problems achievable by using the mean of random variables. I was also fascinated by the set of presentations on various non-biological uses of phylogenetics such as the study of evolution of language (Simon Greenhill), culture (Robert Ross), and especially the broad view on the nature of history by Russell Gray.

Monday evening included fish and chips takeaway dinner on the beach that was about 10 minutes walk from the conference lodge. A number of us brought togs for some swimming and playing in the very light surf before and after dinner.

Two cancellations resulted in a rescheduling of one talk and a last minute decision to open the last Tuesday session to a series of “lightning talks”, presentations of a maximum of 10 minutes by the first people to sign up on the whiteboard.

Wednesday was left open for playing. This is an unusual feature of the NZ Phylogenetics Conference that worked really well for giving us a chance to interact, clear our minds, get some exercise, and return to the conference refreshed. There were no organized activities for the day, but a significant number of us went sea kayaking from the wharf at the centre of town to Cooks Beach.

Thursday resumed the sessions, which other than my talk were quite focused on phylogenetic algorithms and techniques. Friday wrapped up the conference with what I (with my distinctly non-phylogenetics background) thought was a bit of a disturbing theme on difficulties in getting stable results when generating trees from real data. I’ll leave it to the real phylogeneticists to say whether this perceived somber note refers to some real difficulties at the cutting edge of the field, or is simply my lack of familiarity with the subject.

To close on an upbeat, I’ll say that David Penny handily won the bioinf bingo prize by completely filling his bingo card of phrases uttered by speakers during their presentations. Andreas Dress won the prize for most unusual question, itself unusual because he won based on the totality of his questions, not any specific one. I’ll quote (paraphrased to the best of my recollection) a remark of his, made at one of the algorithmic complexity presentations: “Just because you have proved it NP-Hard doesn’t mean we should give up trying to do it.”