Connectionists: NIPS Workshop on New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology

[Gunnar Rätsch]

Dear colleagues,

I would like to invite you to participate in the workshop on

     New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology

on the 9th of December at NIPS 2005 in Whistler, B.C.

If you would like to contribute then please send an extended abstract
by *November 1, 9am EST* to nips-compbio at tuebingen.mpg.de. We still
have a few slots for talks available (details below).

I am looking forward to meet you there!

Gunnar Raetsch


NIPS*05 Workshop
New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology

Workshop email:           nips-compbio at tuebingen.mpg.de
Workshop web address:   http://www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/nipscompbio

Organizers:

* Gal Chechik,      Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
* Christina Leslie, Center for Comp. Learning Systems, Columbia  
University
* Gunnar Raetsch,   Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck  
Society
* Koji Tsuda,       AIST Computational Biology Research Center


Workshop Description:

The field of computational biology has seen a dramatic growth over the
past few years, both in terms of new available data, new scientific
questions and new challenges and for learning and inference. In
particular, biological data is often relationally structured and highly
diverse, thus requires to combine multiple weak evidence from
heterogeneous sources. These could include sequenced genomes of a
variety of organisms, gene expression data from multiple technologies,
protein sequence and 3D structural data, protein interactions, gene
ontology and pathway databases, genetic variation data, and an enormous
amount of textual data in the biological and medical literature. The new
types of scientific and clinical problems, require to develop new
supervised and unsupervised learning approaches that can use these
growing resources.

The goal of this workshop is to present emerging problems and machine
learning techniques in computational biology. Speakers from the
biology/bioinformatics community will present current research problems
in bioinformatics, and we invite contributed talks on novel learning
approaches in computational biology. We encourage contributions
describing either progress on new bioinformatics problems or work on
established problems using methods that are substantially different from
standard approaches. Kernel methods, graphical models, feature selection
and other techniques applied to relevant bioinformatics problems would
all be appropriate for the workshop.


Submission instructions:

Researchers interested in contributing should send an extended abstract
of up to 4 pages (postscript or pdf format) to
nips-compbio at tuebingen.mpg.de by *November 1, 9am EST*.  The workshop
organizers intend to invite submissions of full length versions of
accepted workshop contributions for publication in a special issue of a
BMC Bioinformatics (for information on last years special issue cf.
http://www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/nipscompbio/bmc).


Program Committee:

* Michael I. Jordan, UC Berkeley
* William Stafford Noble, University of Washington
* Kristin Bennett, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
* Nello Cristianini, UC Davis
* Alexander Hartemink, Duke University
* Eran Segal, Stanford University
* Michal Linial, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
* Klaus-Robert Mueller, Fraunhofer FIRST
* Bernhard Schoelkopf, Max Planck Institute for Biol. Cybernetics
* Pierre Baldi, UC Irvine (2004)
* Nir Friedman, Hebrew University and Harvard (2004)
* Eleazar Eskin, UC San Diego (2004)
* Dan Geiger, Technion (2004)
* Alexander Schliep, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (2004)
* Jean-Philippe Vert, Ecole des Mines de Paris (2004)


The workshop is suported by the EU PASCAL network.

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
  Gunnar Rätsch                  http://www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/raetsch
  Friedrich Miescher Laboratory       Gunnar.Raetsch at tuebingen.mpg.de
  Max Planck Society                          Tel: (+49) 7071 601 820
  Spemannstraße 37, 72076 Tübingen, Germany   Fax: (+49) 7071 601 455