Conference Agenda¶
July 15–17, 2026 | Washington Hilton, Washington D.C.
Day 1 — Wednesday, July 15th¶
| Time | Event | Speaker | Presentation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00 – 8:15 AM | Opening Remarks | Asiyah Lin | |
| 8:15 – 9:15 AM | Keynote Speaker | Richard Scheuermann | Toward a complete lexicon of cell types in the biomedical literature |
| 9:15 – 10:00 AM | Invited Talk 1 | Birgit Medal (Virtual) | Curation of early research data: when humans and machines partner we create value and retain trust |
| 10:00 – 11:00 AM | Recess | ||
| 11:00 – 11:45 AM | Invited Talk 2 | Maria Shatz | Environmental Health Language Collaborative: Data standards and ontologies for Exposomics |
| 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM | Invited Talk 3 | Raja Cholan (Virtual) | The Evolution of Health Data Standards and Terminologies at the National Library of Medicine and Potential Implications for the AI Era |
| 12:30 – 1:00 PM | Journal Track 1 | Cui Tao | ACCELERATE-BASSO: Advancing Behavioral and Social Science Research through Ontology Best Practices |
| 1:00 – 2:30 PM | Lunch Break | ||
| 2:30 – 2:50 PM | Conference Paper 2 | James Balhoff | Frontier LLM-based agents can overcome the ontology curation bottleneck for natural phenotypes |
| 2:50 – 3:20 PM | Industry Talk | TBD | TBD |
| 3:20 – 4:40 PM | Poster / Software Demos* | ||
| 5:00 – 6:00 PM | Community Engagement | Asiyah Yu Lin / Anna Maria | Future directions of Biomedical Ontology development during the AI era |
| 6:00 – 8:00 PM | ICBO Dinner / Social Event | Location TBD |
Day 2 — Thursday, July 16th¶
| Time | Event | Speaker | Presentation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00 – 8:10 AM | Opening Remarks | Anna Maria Masci | |
| 8:10 – 8:55 AM | Invited Talk 4 | Reed Shabman | Towards an AI-Ready Data Ecosystem: How Ontologies Support Metadata Findability and Interoperability in the NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal |
| 8:55 – 9:40 AM | Invited Talk 5 | Lynn Schriml | Disease data standardization landscape: role of ontologies, NER and AI in biocuration |
| 9:40 – 10:00 AM | Conference Paper 1 | Melissa Clarkson | Investigating the use of an ontology for grounding LLMs: Using GraphRAG with the Foundational Model of Anatomy |
| 10:00 – 11:00 AM | Recess | ||
| 11:00 – 11:30 AM | Journal Track 2 | Diego López (Virtual) | OnTEPT: A multimodal OWL ontology for post-traumatic stress disorder |
| 11:30 – 11:50 AM | Conference Paper 3 | Christian Kindermann | Consistent but Incorrect: Detecting Discrepancies in Ontologies |
| 11:50 AM – 12:10 PM | Conference Paper 4 | Regina Hurley (revision) | The Injury Ontology |
| 12:10 – 12:30 PM | Conference Paper 5 | Karamarie Fecho | The ROBOKOP Biomedical Knowledge Graph System: Leveraging Ontologies for Data Normalization, Integration, and Query |
| 12:30 – 12:50 PM | Conference Paper 6 | David Osumi-Sutherland | Evidencell - an agentic research assistant for the Cell Ontology |
| 12:50 – 1:00 PM | Concluding Remarks / Feedback Session | Anna Maria Masci / Asiyah Lin | |
| 1:00 – 2:30 PM | Lunch Break | ||
| 2:30 – 6:00 PM | VDOS Workshop |
Day 3 — Friday, July 17th¶
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Cell Workshop |
| 6:00 – 8:00 PM | Organizer's Event |