ACS Chicago - Day #2

The wetter was much better today. This is a view on downtown from the walking bridge between Lake Side and McCormick buildings of the conference site:

CINF morning

Yeah, more CINF session reports; I’m a chemoinformatician, remember. Chen showed us around in the latest changes in ChemDB, such as retrosynthesis planning. Banik shows a patented method for showing differences in a set of spectra, though his examples were not really impressive; if the method is really powerful, the examples might have been picked a bit more careful. And I have to say, in retrospect, I found the presentations in the CINF sessions typically of lower quality than I had expected for the big ACS meeting. Fortunately, meeting all the people here makes more than up for that. Guha presented a potentially powerful method to cluster large and huge data sets with a method that approximated SVD by splitting up the full matrices into many smaller ones.

Laptop Lane

The idea was that us bloggers met up, but that did not quite work out. No problem though. Spoke about many things with several people. Peter pointed me to an email from Noel on getting blog comments on JACS/ChemComm/JCIM papers on the table of contents. And somewhere that day, Jean-Claude pointed me to more chemistry in Second Life (set up by Beth). Both are great follow ups on the blog/wiki session by CHED yesterday! Around 17:00 we left for one of the receptions in the W hotel in one of the WOW rooms, though the view was not that spectacular:

Bulls

I did not stay very long at the party, as I had to leave for the Bulls game against Portland. That was fun indeed! If I knew my first breakfast was going to cost 22 dollar, I would have bought a better ticket, but now I had a Stand 1 ticket which is so high up in the stadium that even the security people had not idea where to send me :) The view was still more than good enough to feel the pain/joy of the blocks and dunks-in-your-face: