If you were one of the unlucky who didn't get their funding proposal or poster in on time, or otherwise had to keep the lab afloat while your colleagues left to jet set around Europe, don't be upset. We have sent our trusty Application Scientist off to do a little reconnaissance on the 24th ISAC Congress in Budapest, Hungary. Here is a blow-by-blow account of the last four days provided by MyCyte correspondent-at-large John Quinn Ph.D...enjoy!!
The travel journal of FlowJo Application Scientists Aaron Hart, Claudio Vallen, Sach Jayasinghe, and John Quinn in Budapest, from John’s perspective.
Saturday, May 17th…
The conference officially began at 2:30 in the afternoon, so we had the morning to get our booth set up. Claudio did a wonderful job in designing some clever promotions to make ISAC a bit more fun for everyone. The Treestar booth this year will feature a Wii Foosball competition, soccer style t-shirts with the names of famous cytometrists on the back for give away, an iPod raffle, and of course four application scientists armed with more computing power than some nations to provide tutorials and support.
The meeting began with the introduction of ISAAC President Elect Robert F. Murphy by outgoing president J. Paul Robinson, and a lecture on 3D tissue cytometry by Peter So. At the conclusion of the opening talks it was time to enjoy the beautiful weather and scenery. Aaron and I set off for the Pest bank of the Danube and enjoyed a self-guided walking tour of the town, outdoor dining on the riverbank at Dunacorso ( HYPERLINK "http://www.dunacorso.hu/" http://www.dunacorso.hu/) and a spot of last minute shopping to make sure the booth had all the appropriate power converters. When I say the “Pest side”, I’m not being rude. Budapest is actually the union of two ancient cities, Buda and Pest. Buda, the city occupying the west side of the Danube contains the “castle district”, a plateau fortified with numerous castles built in the middle ages. The interior of the city holds the residences and institutions of the resonance era wealthy. Pest, the city on the east bank of the Danube, was built up to mirror Vienna by the Autro-Hungarian Empire, and became one of the more cosmopolitan cities in Europe. Buda and Pest were joined in 1867 to become Budapest. The city survived near complete destruction by two world wars, and then the oppressive Soviet occupation to once again become an enticing tourist destination that we’re visiting.
Sunday, May 18th…
Aaron and I opened Sunday with a talk on the new features in FlowJo. I introduced polychromatic plots, the copy and paste keyword feature, the sample validation platform, and the improved compensation wizard. Aaron discussed the plans for versions 7.3 and the goals for version 9 and then gave a lecture on the theory and application of FlowJo’s compensation platform, focusing on how to properly set the width basis, w. The talk was attended by roughly 60 members and was well received. Our slides to the talks are available at: Insert link to talk
The booth was lively all afternoon as familiar faces and those newly interested stopped in to ask some questions and play on the Wii.
I attended the first of two Data Standards Task Force (DSTF) meetings in the late afternoon and enjoyed a lively discussion on the merits of netCDF versus DICOM. The discussion about how and whether to try to include image cytometry into a single standard with flow cytometry also continued. After the meeting everyone reconvened at the booth for the Exhibit Mixer. With the wine flowing, the Wii competition heated up.
After the meeting adjourned a small group including all of the Apsci’s enjoyed an excellent dinner at (restaurant on Kalvin ter – don’t remember the name, anybody else?) We sat in the courtyard in the middle of a large palatial structure and enjoyed a nice Tokai, food, and conversation.
Monday, May 19th…
We spent Monday mostly at the booth, taking turns to attend lectures depending on our individual interests. I attended the second DSTF meeting during which it was resolved that MIFLOWCYT would be applied as a standard for what must be reported from a cytometry experiment and that it would stand alone from the in progress FCS4.0 or the Analytical Cytometry Standard (ACS). It was resolved that the ACS will require an index file, a documentation of the instrumentation used in an XML format, and XML documents to describe gating and transformation that may be left as blank placeholders for circumstances where no gating or transformation has been applied. The ACS file can then include a data file of some type, netCDF has been proposed as the data standard, and then whatever additional files a manufacturer might like to provide. The result of this meeting was an emphasis to complete the instrumentation XML schema to include in the first proposal of ACS, and so Josef Spidlen and I stayed on after the meeting to work out the kinks and finished off the document.
During the break Aaron and I took the metro into town again for lunch and site seeing. The highlight of this trip was a glance at the Parliament building and the surrounding fanfare of monuments. 
Monday night was the BD sponsored conference party, and so after the in-conference happy hour we all shifted venues to the intercontinental hotel and enjoyed a night of music, hors d'oeuvres, and conversation.
Tuesday, May 20th…
Claudio presented an introduction to FlowJo on Tuesday that was attended by another 60 ISSAC members. Also of interest was a talk Mario Roederer of the NIH on how flow data should be presented that immediately caused the DSTF to ask me to revise the XML schema. The booth was again lively.
During the break Aaron, Sach, and I were able to take the subway to Buda Castle, the center of the castle district. Buda castle was the ruling seat of the city of Buda and various empires. Currently it serves as an archeology museum. The castle is humongous and every bit of it is ornate. We were all greatly impressed. Due to our limited time, we were able to walk about a fifth of the total museum space, which was enough to give all of us sore feet. We then enjoyed lunch on the veranda at the castle’s café.
On the way back to the conference we stopped to see St. Matthias church, which proved to be another architectural marvel despite the renovations in progress to its bell tower.
We returned to the conference to reopen the booth, answer a slew of questions, and again host some Wii play. As the day drew to a close, the girls hired by the venue to stand by the doors, look good and give directions finally drew up the courage to come ask for our extra t-shirts, and are now in possession of cytometrist soccer shirts. All throughout Budapest the local soccer fans will be wondering who this Shapiro guy is that all of the ladies are wearing the jersey of.
Wednesday, May 21st…
On the last day of the conference we attended to the booth for the three hours it was open in the morning, packed up, and then became tourists for an afternoon. The lot of us took the subway to a bus, to another bus to get out to Stalin Park, a park that houses the relics of the departed Soviet regime. It was oddly riveting to see the propaganda driven statues of workers and soldiers shaking hands, of violent dictators embossed in stone, and of the workers shaking free of the oppression of capitalism. The Hungarians have demonstrated their scorn for the old Regime by defacing the occasional dictator and ripping down a large statue of Stalin, leaving only his boots to remain. Most of the souvenirs for sale taunt communism though South Park and Simpson cartoons. In this spirit we felt safe to make light of the severe statues, including Sach and I trying to be capitalist pigs and hold the worker back.
Sach and John…capitalists The workers emancipated
Possibly the most disturbing part of the park was the film room that was showing Soviet instructional videos pertaining to how to be a good “observer” (read domestic spy on your friends and neighbors). We saw feature such as how to execute a proper home invasion, how to rig a hidden camera into a travel bag, and how to document that your neighbor is an enemy of the empire and have them sent to the Gulag. Frightening.
After returning from Lenin Park, we split company. Claudio attended the closing ceremony, while Aaron, Sach and I left open the possibility of attending after some more touristing, but ended up simply touristing the entire time. There was so much to see! We walked down Andrássy Avenue, the Hungarian avenue of the arts. The avenue was mostly built during the era of the Autro-Hungarian Empire to give Pest the look and feel of Vienna. The jewel of the avenue itself is the Opera House, which we took a brief tour of.
The Opera House Vajadahunyad Castle
Andrássy Avenue begins near the Danube and terminates at City Park or Városliget. The park entrance has a traffic loop with the center island occupied by an arched structure housing statues of each of the kings of Hungary from ancient times. Upon entering the park, we came to Vajadahunyad Castle, a spectacular fortress built in 1896 to represent Hungarian architecture at its finest at the turn of the century. The castle was a site to see, or a great place to have dinner. We did both. At the restaurant, positioned above the castle moat, there was a plate called “The Anonymous Plate of Plenty”, which was simply ordered by the number of partakers. We ordered for three and made a night of it.
The Anonymous Plate of Plenty The kings of Hungary
We caught flights out on Thursday the 22nd so we were out of time to explore Budapest, leaving much still to be seen when next we return.
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