Advancing Automation through Networking and Collaboration

11 Nov 2019

SLAS CEO Vicki Loise, shares highlights from SLAS Europe 2019 and explains how the conference brings together a community of automation specialists for interactive sessions and networking opportunities, this year with a focus on exploring new areas of entomology and 3D organoids.

Hi. I'm Vicki Loise. I'm the CEO for SLAS. SLAS is the society for laboratory automation and screening. And we are a community of 19,000 life science researchers in both the automation and screening space. And we have members of our community from around the world but certainly here in Europe is our focus this week.
And we are just so very happy to be here and connecting with our European community. This is the second time we're holding this event and we're seeing our vendor community grow, we're seeing that they're having the opportunity to really reach out to our European community and make some important connections that they don't always get to make at our international conference in the states.
Our sessions have been really active and interactive. We've seen a great, great interest in 3D organoids this time around and we have some exciting keynote speakers coming up today and tomorrow, some new and interesting aspects that we're going into with entomology. So we're really looking forward to more interaction, more interest, and kind of exploring into some new spaces for SLAS.
At SLAS Europe this year, we have been thrilled to announce and launch SLAS CONNECTED. SLAS CONNECTED is an online networking community where members of our community can network and connect with each other 24/7, 365 days a year. They can connect either by subject that they might be interested in or a particular working group that they're part of.
They can post questions, they can share documents, they can reach out to colleagues to solve a problem. And we're absolutely thrilled to be able to have announced that while we were here at SLAS Europe. Earlier this year, we launched SLAS APPLIED which is our online learning management system.
And there you can access recordings from our international conference and our European sample management event that we held earlier this year in Berlin. We also will be capturing some of the content here at SLAS Europe and posting it on that system. It again, is a 24/7 opportunity for anybody in our community or anybody who's interested in those subjects to access information and content.
So, SLAS is really excited to continue our growth here in Europe as well as North America. And we are going to start to focus a little bit more in the data science and AI world. We have a new symposia in Boston this October on AI and machine learning. And you are going to see a lot more in that data science, data management space at our international conference, at this Europe conference.
And we certainly expect that that symposia will be a success and we'll be continuing with that beyond this year.