4^th Annual Congress on Infectious Diseases August 29-30, 2018 Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Boston is placed among the top 30 most economically powerful cities in the world. The city is considered to be a world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship, with approximately 2,000 start-ups. Boston's economic base also includes finance, professional and business services, biotechnology, information technology, and government activities. About $363 billion, the Greater Boston metropolitan area has the sixth-largest economy in the country and 12th-largest in the world. Boston's colleges and universities exert a significant influence on the regional economy. Boston entices more than 350,000 college students from around the world, who contribute more than US$4.8 billion annually to the city's economy. The city is home to a number of technology companies and is a hub for biotechnology, with the Milken Institute rating Boston as the top life sciences cluster in the country. Boston receives the highest absolute amount of annual funding from the National Institutes of Health of all cities in the United States. The city is considered highly advanced for a variety of reasons, including the presence of academia, access to venture capital, and the presence of many high-tech companies. Tourism also put together a large part of Boston's economy, with 21.2 million domestic and international visitors spending $8.3 billion in 2011; apart from visitors from Canada and Mexico, in excess of 1.4 million international tourists visited Boston in 2014.