created by Geraldine_VdAuwera
on 2016-10-14
Tomorrow, a bunch of us are packing our bags and heading to Vancouver for the American Society of Human Genetics’ [Annual Meeting](http://www.ashg.org/2016meeting/).
We have a busy week ahead of us, between the [GA4GH](http://genomicsandhealth.org/) Plenary Meeting, the various workshops that are organized around the ASHG meeting, and the meeting itself, which draws thousands of researchers from across the globe. Our Broad Genomics team this year is going to be pretty active in a variety of events, which you can find detailed [here](http://genomicinfo.broadinstitute.org/acton/media/13431/ashg2016-events?sid=TV2:3B3WTlOVr) on the website of the Broad Genomics Services.
Soo Hee and I from our little support team will be rather busy as well. We’re finalizing preparations for the workshop we’re teaching on Tuesday, which will focus on what’s hot in GATK4. As a reminder, GATK4 is currently still in “alpha preview” phase, but we expect it to move to beta status over the course of the next quarter, and I personally hold high hopes of releasing it as the officially supported version in early 2017!
In any case, we have some cool live demos and a full CNV pipeline hands-on tutorial to show off at the workshop to a maxed-out audience of 225 people (no pressure…). Speaking of which, the materials for the workshop are now available for download [over here](https://software.broadinstitute.org/gatk/download/workshops). The bundle file contains both a special GATK4 jar and a test dataset. If you’ll be joining us in the workshop, please make sure you have downloaded the bundle BEFORE the workshop, as its size is large (~400Mb) and you can’t count on the conference center wifi to be good enough to download onsite.
If you’re coming to ASHG but are not coming to the workshop (did you wait too long to register? ;) ), you can still come chat with us at the Broad Genomics booth in the exhibition hall. I’ll post a detailed schedule of when we’ll be hanging out there — there are some sessions I don’t want to miss, but I have yet to compile the final list — and you can for sure find me at the [Meet the Expert](http://genomicinfo.broadinstitute.org/acton/media/13431/ashg2016-meet-the-experts?sid=TV2:vgJvSisQx) event that will take place at the booth. I’ll be the so-called expert in the Thursday, October 20th 10:00am – 11:00am slot. You can also follow [@gatk_dev](https://twitter.com/gatk_dev?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) on Twitter for the latest schedule developments and/or social event opportunities.
And if you’re not coming to Vancouver, either because you [blame Canada](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOR38552MJA) or you study a different organism and you don’t see what all the fuss is about these humans we keep going on about — well, we’ll still see you on the forum, and you can always invite us to teach a workshop at your local institution. We’ve had a really fantastic series this year and are now taking invitations for 2017. More on that later!
Updated on 2016-10-14