Announcements
- Robinson, Berenbaum featured in PBS Nature episode
BeeSpace co-investigator Gene Robinson and May Berenbaum, head of the University of Illinois Entomology Department, are each featured in "Silence of the Bees," the inaugural episode of the 26th season of Nature, PBS Television's flagship natural history series. The hourlong episode premiered Oct. 24, 2007, on most PBS stations. Video footage and related information are at www.pbs.org/nature/bees . - Schatz presents BeeSpace research at International Biocuration meeting
BeeSpace principal investigator Bruce Schatz presented a talk on gene summarization features of the BeeSpace Navigator software at the Second International Biocuration Meeting in San Jose, Calif., held Oct. 24-28, 2007. The paper, "Gene Summarizer: Software for automatically generating structured summaries from biomedical literature," was authored by Xu Ling, Jing Jiang, Qiaozhu Mei, Moushumi Sen Sarma, ChengXiang Zhai, Gene Robinson, and Dr. Schatz. The abstract and slideset from the talk are here. - Robinson named Swanlund Chair at University of Illinois
BeeSpace co-investigator Gene Robinson is one of four University of Illinois professors to be named Swanlund Chairs, the highest endowed titles at the University. Robinson is the G. William Arends Professor of Integrative Biology in the department of entomology, the director of the Bee Research Facility, the director of the Neuroscience Program, and leads research on the theme of neurogenomics at the Institute for Genomic Biology. - Qiaozhu Mei, Co-authors Win Student Paper Award
BeeSpace programmer Qiaozhu Mei, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, and his co-authors have been awarded "Best Student Paper Runner-Up" status at KDD '07, the annual conference of the Knowledge Discovery and Data mining Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Mei, Xuehua Shen and BeeSpace co-investigator ChengXiang Zhai earned the award for their paper on Automatic Labeling of Multinomial Topic Models.
This is the second consecutive KDD Student Paper Award for Mei, who with co-authors Dong Xin, Hong Cheng, Jiawei Han, and ChengXiang Zhai won Runner-Up status at KDD '06 for the paper Generating Semantic Annotations for Frequent Patterns With Context Analysis.
- Local media highlight Robinson's role in honey bee genome
BeeSpace co-investigator Gene Robinson discussed bee research and the new genome in an hourlong appearance on local NPR affiliate WILL-AM's "Focus 580" show, on Nov. 20, 2006. Audio (MP3 and RealMedia formats) is linked here: http://will.uiuc.edu/am/focus/archives/06/061120.htm. Robinson and fellow UIUC bee researcher Charles Whitfield were also profiled in a feature article in the Champaign, Ill, News-Gazette on Nov. 19. The article is archived here. - Bee Genome published in Nature
The honey bee genome has been published in the Oct. 26, 2006, issue of Nature, by the Honeybee Genome Sequencing Consortium. BeeSpace co-investigator Gene E. Robinson is a leader of the consortium. Co-investigators Susan Fahrbach and Sandra Rodriguez-Zas and project-affiliated researchers Saurabh Sinha and Xu Ling are also among the 170 researchers worldwide who contributed to the work. Learn more here. - Bruce Named University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar
Professor Chip Bruce, BeeSpace co-PI for Education, has been named a University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar for the 2006-2007 school year. The award recognizes faculty members who represent excellence in teaching, and draws upon their talents to mentor other educators on campus. Each recipient is asked to design a program that will impact and improve the teaching at Illinois. - UIUC Wins Grant to Complete Pig Genome Sequence
The first sequence of the swine genome will be completed at the University of Illinois, with the help of a two-year, $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Jan. 13, 2006. Lawrence B. Schook, a professor of animal sciences at Illinois and co-chairman of the International Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium, will head the project. BeeSpace principal investigator Bruce Schatz, interim head of the UIUC department of medical information science, is a member of the project team.
- Bruce Receives 2006 ALISE Pratt-Severn Faculty Innovation Award
Professor Chip Bruce, BeeSpace co-principal investigator for education and outreach, has received the Pratt-Severn Faculty Innovation Award, presented by the Association for Library and Information Science Education. - Robinson Presents Chancellor's Lecture on Bees and Social Behavior
On Nov. 2, 2005, BeeSpace biology lead Gene Robinson presented "Overachievers: What Honey Bees Teach Us About Genes, Brain, and Social Behavior," the Inaugural Chancellor's Special Lecture for the UIUC Center for Advanced Study. A streaming video of the talk is available here (Realmedia format). - BeeSpace Featured in National Science Foundation Special Report
The BeeSpace Project is featured in NSF's Special Report on Foundations in Integrative Biological Research (FIBR), published in October, 2005. - BeeSpace Paper to be Presented at Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (January 2006)
The Beespace informatics group will present its first published paper at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing in Maui, Hawaii, in January 2006. The proceedings paper, which may be viewed here, discusses the first software that automatically generates gene summaries from biomedical literature. The authors present a two-stage summarization method, which involves retrieving relevant articles and then extracting their most informative sentences to generate a structured gene summary. - BeeSpace PI Schatz to head Medical Information Sciences at UIUC
Effective September 16, 2005, Bruce Schatz has become the new Interim Head of the UIUC Department of Medical Information Sciences. It has been empty since the retirement of Nobel Laureate Paul Lauterbur.
Learn about our BeeSpace Concept Navigator prototype and try it out for yourself, via a web interface. This is the first-generation version of the resource, unveiled at our Summer 2005 Annual Workshop.
Gene Robinson, our project's principal biology investigator, was one of 72 scholars nationwide elected to the National Academy of Sciences in May 2005.
ChengXiang Zhai, lead bioinformatics investigator for BeeSpace, was among 20 researchers nationally to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in June 2005. (external link)
Our Education pages feature a new overview of bee biology designed by David Stone (M.S., Entomology), a high school biology teacher working with the BeeSpace Project.
View presentation videos and slidesets from the first BeeSpace Workshop, held June 6-7, 2005, on the University of Illinois campus.
