Success is the result of planning, hard work, determina-

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When meeting someone for the first time-whether another PhD student, or the Founding Editor-in-chief of PLOS Computational Biology-nothing breaks the ice like eating pancakes or having drinks together. A social atmosphere provides a relaxed, informal environment where people can connect, share ideas, and form collaborations. Being able to build a network and thrive in a social environment is crucial to a successful scientific career. This article highlights the importance of bringing people together who speak the same scientific language in an informal setting. Using examples of events held by Regional Student Groups of the ISCB's Student Council, this article shows that socializing is much more than simply sharing a drink. Socializing in ScienceClear communication of research ideas and results is vital in order to become a successful scientist. Although conference presentations are an efficient way to share results, the one-way nature of this type of communication does not lend itself to collaboration. Setting up collaborations is often better achieved in an informal social setting, which provides an intimate environment with time to discuss things in detail. A social setting is where new colleagues are found, collaborations are established, and existing connections are strengthened.Social settings make networking easier by reducing boundaries to communication. Typically, after a keynote presentation at a conference there are relatively few questions from young scientists. This is due to a communication barrier-the junior scientist may be intimidated by the achievements of the senior scientist, or may be afraid to ask a question that might be deemed ''stupid.'' A social setting can remove the communication barrier, as the threshold for asking a question in front of a highly critical and expert audience is far higher than asking a question when sharing a drink together.More often than not, in fact, experts enjoy discussing their science with young scientists and appreciate that a fresh point of view can provide stimulating discussion. Organized social events can therefore be helpful, especially for those who don't characteristically initiate contact with strangers. An event or activity that provides the opportunity for introductions can ease any awkwardness and improve networking. The Importance of NetworkingIn a multidisciplinary research field like computational biology, it is crucial to have an environment where scientists can connect and communicate directly. PhD students and postdocs will often work in a research group that consists of scientists with diverse educational backgrounds. The supervisor of a PhD student may not have a background in computational biology. Therefore, it is necessary to create a supporting network that can be called on to share experiences. Moreover, a solid network becomes a crucial element for future collaborations and taking the next steps in one's career.

Sharing results, techniques, and challenges is paramount to advance our understanding of any field of science. In the scientific community this exchange of ideas is mainly made possible through national and international conferences. Scientists have the opportunity to showcase their work, receive feedback, and improve their presentation skills. However, conferences can be large and intimidating for young researchers. In addition, for many of the more prestigious conferences, the very high number of submissions and low selection rate are major limitations to aspiring young researchers aiming to present their work to the scientific community. To improve student participation and proliferation of information, regional student groups have successfully organized conferences and symposia specifically aimed at students. This gives more students the opportunity to present their work and receive valuable experience and insight from peers and leaders in the field. At the same time, it is an ideal way for students to gain familiarity with the conference experience. In this paper, we highlight some of the benefits of participating in such student conferences, and we review the challenges we have encountered when organizing them. Both topics are illustrated in detail with examples from different ISCB Student Council Regional Student Groups.

This paper proposes distributed traffic monitoring and controlling model using sensors and dedicated traffic servers. This model is described as basic role-oriented processes communicating though primitive interaction protocols. The model is aimed to provide an enabling communications framework upon which multi-agent system models can be organized and built to be used for an simulation of an road map and to estimate the traffic behavior (to provide information about the best routes). This paper presents a hierarchical routing strategy for controlling the traffic of that region. The model assists the drivers to get the desired destination taking into account the current situation of traffic characteristics. It gives the estimated arrival time and the corresponding distance between a start and an arrival point. The necessary information is obtained from current traffic position using sensors (used as dynamic information and to characterize the traffic, for example if traffic is jammed on an area, we can predict alter paths). The information given by the advisory system has the form of self generated message according to the condition of traffic using the given algorithm. The proposed algorithm uses well known searching techniques and data structures for appropriate handling of traffic in a sensor based web model for traffic management. To achieve this objective the model uses proposed algorithm on parallel communicating servers which also communicate with end users.