Singapore, Day 5

Today was a mixed bag ot talks.

Louxin Zhang started with a couple of proofs about what he called "stable" networks; and Stefan Grünewald developed his thoughts on quartet algoritms for splits graphs. At the other extreme, Nadine Ziemert talked entirely biology, introducing the audience to the problem of trying to study the evolution of secondary metabolites. In between, Eric Tannier tried to use horizontal gene transfer to date the nodes of networks, assuming that HGT requires a temporally consistent network. Francois-Joseph Lapointe produced the only really statistical talk of the week, trying to produce p-values for patterns on sequence similarity networks.

Daniel Huson popped in for the last day, and presented us with some ideas for the future development of both SplitsTree (unrooted networks) and Dendroscope (rooted networks). Apparently, the need is for SplitsTree to handle larger sets of trees, while for Dendroscope it is to produce networks from pairs of input trees. He also noted that there are still more networks being produced using median joining rather than neighbor-net, due to the amount of work being done on human mitochondrial sequences.

An interest was expressed in continuing the series of meetings on phylogenetic networks (Leiden 2012, Leiden 2014) — I first met most of the people working on networks in phylogenetics in Uppsala in 2004 (Phylogenetic Combinatorics and Applications).

Today we also celebrated Dan Gusfield's 2^6 birthday, with a strawberry cream cake.

So, all in all, a very successful meeting.

After the sessions finished, I went down to the Gardens By The Bay to look at the Supertree Grove. As you can see, a "super" tree is by any definition actually a network.