UIUC Sig-Bio Homepage: Meetings

Sigbio will meet on Tuesdays at 6:30 unless this is a problem for many people. Our meeting are usually informal - we have used the time in the past for discussions, tours, and project work / planning. Check here or our newsgroup, uiuc.org.acm.sigbio for meeting summaries. Also, if you are not already, please sign our list to receive e-mail (meeting reminders and project info.)

Meeting Minutes

Engineering Open House 1998:: This semester Sigio has been working on the VAT for display in the 1998 Engineering Open House. EOH was again a success. Even thought we were not judged, many interested visitors stopped by our display. These people included students, teachers, and many people just becoming aquainted with the WWW.
Before its public disply this year, Romesh Kumbhani and Mary Lee decided to reorganize the VAT so that a user could see all we have done in the last three years on this project at one time. The result- a good looking and very functional site! Even thought we were not able to add any multimedia components in time for EOH, we still plan on pursuing this like of work in the future.
As an accessory project, two members of Sigbio (Ibrahim Merchant and Siddhartha Bhatt) wrote a JAVA quiz game so that visitors could test their knowledge of anatomy. Again, this project will continue as well.
Also in the future, Sigbio will continue to work on the Pre-medical forum- a web site designed to help pre-med students get into medical school.

September 30, 1997:: In this last short meeting, we discussed: Possibility of creating a WWW-based pre-medical resource center for students (mainly here at UIUC). This would include a message board and maybe an on-line chat type thing.
The movie night was pushed back to this Friday. We hope to get started on flyers Monday or tuesday at the meeting. If anyone has access to pictures of "Flatliners" or "Outbreak" - please bring them to the next meeting.

First meetings, Fall 1997:: If you were able to make it to Quad Day '97, you probably could not miss the ACM booth and Sigbio. We had about a dozen people sign-up as interested and have seen several of these people so far in the first few meetings. This semster, we have decided to add the Digestive SYstem to of VAT. We hope to incorperate some video or possibly VRML or other 3D modeling techniques to visualize the Digestive system or one of its organs. To help those with little or no HTML experience, we will be doing an informal HTML Workshop on a weekly basis. Hopefully we can get everyone aquainted enought to be able to make a contribution this year.
Further, we hope to continue with Lab tours of researchers around campus who successfuly utilize computers in Biological research (or vise-versa). In the past, these have been really fun and are a great way to meet faculty. Of course, Sigbio is always looking for experienced programmers to help get one of our cell-modeling projects off the ground.
Lastly, we hope to give a free SIGBIO Movie Night sometime early this fall to attract new members or just waste time. Suggesions so far: Outbreak, Flatliners, and Gettign In.
For any recent updates on Sigbio, please stop by this page often.

Engineering Open House 1997:: EOH 97 was a success for Sigbio. We Successfully completed the Nervous System coverage for the VAT and updated the look of the Lymphatic System pages. Hundreds of visitors to our "booth" seemed to enjoy either looking at the pictures and chemical models or actually taking the time to read the accompanying information! Also, because I'm sure few could take the time to read our site at EOH, we distributed hundreds of slips of paper with our WWW address. Hopefully, these people will stop by from home (although we probably should tone-down the graphic sizes for modem users!)
From some of the people who visited the booth, it was recommended to begin the skeletal-muscular system, or the cardio-vascular system in the future. We'll have to decide soon, but for now, Sigbio is taking a break and going on it's first (official) Sigbio Bowling night(a previous attempt was aborted last month). For all who can attend, it will be at our regular meeting time Tuesday March 18th.

Minutes for October, November, and December:: In these past few months, Sigbio has been working steadily on the virtual anatomy textbook. The majority of these meeting have involved actively searching the WWW for good Nervous-system-related resources including pictures, videos, and text. Also, we have found various books on the subject and have taken full advantage of the ACM's scanner to product colorful images to accent our information. Plans were discussed for EOH- we decided to make our pages multimedia rich (sounds, videos, etc...) in such a way as to not waste bandwidth entirely! One suggestion was to give proper pronunciation of all difficult terms that we use on the site. Also worked on was the general layout of the site. We tentatively agreed on using few if any frames because of last years constant re sizing and correcting what visitors changed. Instead of frames, we hope to have a good mix of image maps and links to allow random or ordered browsing of our pages.; Also in these months, we have seen greater interest by the student. Those stopping by include students (undergrad and grad) interested in chemical modeling and related fields. Becuase of this, Andrew Dalke will prepare and give a workshop on Tcl/Tk programming next semester. Other ideas expressed include doing a real programming project to model a human cell that allows many changes and gives their results on cell chemistry and bodily physiology.; Next semester (until EOH), will be mainly focused on completing the textbook, but after we hope to give more time to our other projects.

Minutes for Tuesday September 17, 1996: This week, we really didn't have a chance to get anything done. So, I hope by next week we can get enough people together to start getting to work on our projects.; We DID agree (sort of) on a good flyer to post on campus. I plan on doing this on Friday or possibly the weekend. Also, I thought it would be helpful to introduce those in the Bio120-122 series to our group via an overhead before class. If anyone is in one of these classes (over 400 people usually) please let me know if you are willing to display an overhead.; Our WWW page has just been revamped and we need some good URL's from the WWW for our links page. We tried this last year, and we have 4 different lists that never came together! Hopefully, we can get enough to actually make sub-divisions! :); Other than that, if anyone finds any good information on the nervous system (particularly good schematic drawings or possibly animations and video)- make a bookmark and bring (or mail) it to the next meeting. Hope to see you there..

Minutes for Tuesday September 10, 1996: In this relatively short meeting, we agreed to proceed with the Neural system for the Web Anatomy Textbook. Keeping in mind that this could be ANY level of complexity, we are aiming at a "good" coverage of the type of material one would get in a college Anatomy class. Thus, we are going to need accurate pictures, brief text exerts, and an intuitive interface.; Andrew Dalke has already agreed to search for computer-generated representations of many Neurotransmitters. If you would like to contribute, please come the next meeting or e-mail one of us.; Also discussed was a project to add a graphical interface (using Java perhaps) to a computer-modeled cellular translation program created from a guy at MIT. Joe Lasky suggested that we take this program (which looks mainly at kinetics of translation) and create a more simplified graphical interactive interface (it is text only currently).; Naturally, this will take people with WWW and Java experience and probably an artist.

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