**[24-25 March, Melbourne](http://australianbioinformatics.net/gaw-2014)**

The 1st Galaxy Australasia Workshop 2014 (GAW 2014) was held in Melbourne, Australia on 24 and 25th March 2014.

The Galaxy Australasia Workshop was a great opportunity to participate in two full days of presentations, discussions, poster sessions, keynotes and lightning talks, all about ways of using Galaxy for high-throughput biology, imaging and other scientific applications. The workshop will also include Training Sessions taught by Galaxy developers and master users. GAW 2014 ran 24 and 25th March, immediately preceding Computational and Simulation Sciences and eResearch in Melbourne.

GAW 2014 also included poster session and keynote speakers.

**You should attend to: **

• Present your work!
• Learn best practices for deploying Galaxy, defining and installing resources, and managing and moving large datasets.
• Network with others in the Galaxy community who are facing similar challenges and using Galaxy and other tools to address them.
• Learn what the Galaxy Project's plans are, and contribute to Galaxy's future direction.

• Learn

  • how to visualize your data in Galaxy and use visualization to guide your analysis (visual analytics)
  • how to share, publish, and reuse your analyses with Galaxy
  • how to perform and enable your users to perform common, yet complex, analyses using Galaxy
  • when and how to use Galaxy on the Cloud

Program

Day 1, 24th March 2014

Posters

Posters to be displayed throughout the day:

Day 2, 25th March 2014

Venue(s)

GAW 2014 was held in Melbourne, Australia on 24 and 25th March 2014. The first day (Monday) was at Monash University, MBI Auditorium (Building 220), 770 Blackburn Rd, Clayton (map); next to the Australian Synchrotron.
For the 2nd day (Tuesday) we moved downtown to the Melbourne Convention Centre, the venue for the Computational and Simulation Sciences and eResearch.

Travel Info

Airport to/from City

Taxi / Bus / Skybus

myki public transport

It may be worth buying a myki card; then you will have no issues using train/bus to Clayton and trams around the city. $6 for the card, plus $12.12 bus/train return to Clayton campus, plus trams around the city.

Monday: Clayton MBI Auditorium, 770 Blackburn Rd

The Australian Synchrotron is about 15 minutes walk from the Monash University Clayton Campus Bus Loop. Travelling to Clayton Campus and Public Transport to Clayton Campus - Detail

Tuesday: Melbourne Convention Centre

Directions

Consider Melbourne City Bikes, though the closest Bike Share Station is across the river.

Promotion

Help get the word out about GAW 2014.

Please print, post and distribute the conference flier at your organization, and or events.

The conference logo is available in 200 pixel, 400 pixel, and 600 pixel resolutions for inclusion on web sites, presentations, and posters.

Twitter Hashtag

Please use #gaw2014 as the Twitter hashtag for the meeting.

Conference Report

The first Galaxy Australasia Workshop was held on Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th March. Conference venues and catering were provided by CSIRO (Australia's national science agency) so attendance was free.

Day 1 was held at the Monash Biomedical Imaging Auditorium at Monash University. The large auditorium did make the audience seem small, and perhaps the distance of the venue from the Melbourne CBD discouraged those few who had registered but did not attend.

Ross Lazarus (Baker IDI/Galaxy) opened in his usual entertaining manner and told us Why Galaxy matters: Reproducible complex analyses as a scientific commodity.

Andrew Lonie (VLSCI/GVL), despite the usual risks of doing anything live, successfully demonstrated how to Launch a bioinformatics analysis server installed with Galaxy on the Australian Research Cloud and a handful of attendees followed along and launched their own GVL Galaxy server.

Mark Crowe (QFAB/GVL) presented a tutorial on using Galaxy, aimed at the members of the audience new to Galaxy.

The tips and tricks open mic session went well, with even some experienced Galaxy users learning a few things they hadn’t known.

The rest of the afternoon consisted of some more presentations and then a panel discussion about Setting up and Administering Galaxy, which again worked quite well given our small audience size. This reflects on the level of engagement of all those present.

The day closed amidst the usual scrum of organising taxis and public transport to return to accommodation and the evening’s ad hoc social events.

Three posters were displayed, including "Microbial Community Analysis of Indonesia Tempeh Employing Metagenome Galaxy" which was brought to us by some enthusiasts all the way from Indonesia.

Day 2 was held in the Melbourne Convention Centre, alongside CSIRO’s Computational and Simulation Sciences and eResearch conference.

Nate Coraor, our special guest from the Galaxy Project, entertained us with a look at working versions of Galaxy from the past, and updated us on Galaxy in the present and coming in the future.

Then two presentations about using Galaxy for Bioinformatics Analysis: Using Galaxy for Proteogenomics from Ira Cooke (Latrobe) and shRNA-seq analysis in Galaxy from Matthew Ritchie (WEHI).

The GVL Project and CSIRO each gave us a few presentations about their progress with Galaxy, including CSIRO’s Philippe Moncuquet explaining how CSIRO is managing the large volumes of data.

Further interesting talks included Yousef Kowsar (VLSCI/GVL) showing us progress with an Australian Research Cloud version of GenomeSpace integration with Galaxy, Clare Sloggett (VLSCI/GVL) demonstrating some utilities that enhance the GVL command line servers, Yulia Arzhaeva (CSIRO) showing a Galaxy implementation of Cellular Imaging tools rather than Bioinformatics Tools and Carsten Friedrich (CSIRO) showing a Galaxy Tool interface to Secure Cloud Data Storage.

David Lovell (CSIRO), as representative of the Australian Bioinformatics Network, closed the conference by working with us to develop a worthwhile mind map (pdf) of actions we would take as a result of attending the Conference.

Slide presentations appear on the GAW2014 conference programme.