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 8th or 9th of December at NIPS'06 in Whistler, B.C. (http:// 
nips.cc).

If you would like to contribute then please send an extended abstract
by *October 31, 11:59am (Samoa time)* 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*06 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
* Quaid Morris,      Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research,  
University of Toronto
* William S. Noble,  Department of Genome Sciences, University of  
Washington
* Koji Tsuda,        Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics,  
Tübingen, Germany
* Gunnar Raetsch,    Friedrich Miescher Lab. of the Max Planck  
Society, Tübingen, Germany

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
(1-4 pages, postscript or pdf format) to nips-compbio at tuebingen.mpg.de
by *October 31, 11:59pm (Samoa time)*.  The workshop allows submissions
of papers that are under review or have been recently published in a
conference or a journal. This is done to encourage presentation of  
mature
research projects that are interesting to the community. The authors  
should
clearly state any overlapping published work at time of submission.
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 (previous issue is available at
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/7?issue=S1)

Program Committee:

* Pierre Baldi, UC Irvine
* Kristin Bennett, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
* Mathieu Blanchette, McGill University
* Florence d'Alche, Université d'Evry-Val d'Essonne, Genopole
* Eleazar Eskin, UC San Diego
* Brendan Frey, University of Toronto
* Nir Friedman, Hebrew University and Harvard
* Michael I. Jordan, UC Berkeley
* Michal Linial, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
* Klaus-Robert Müller, Fraunhofer FIRST
* Uwe Ohler, Duke University
* Eran Segal, Stanford University
* Alexander Schliep, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics
* Jean-Philippe Vert, Ecole des Mines de Paris


Please check http://www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/nipscompbio/cfp  
regularly for updates.

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Gunnar Rätsch                         http://www.fml.mpg.de/raetsch
Friedrich Miescher Laboratory       Gunnar.Raetsch at tuebingen.mpg.de
Max Planck Society                          Tel: (+49) 7071 601 820
Spemannstraße 39, 72076 Tübingen, Germany   Fax: (+49) 7071 601 801