Statistical Analysis of DNA and Protein Sequences

[Heather S. Dawson]

                     A Newton Institute Workshop

          Statistical Analysis of DNA and Protein Sequences

                        20 - 24 October 1997

  Organisers: D Haussler (UCSC), R Durbin (Sanger) and C M Bishop (Aston)

With the Human Genome Project and other model organism genome sequencing
projects now in full swing, there is a growing need for statistical
analysis of databases containing DNA, RNA and protein sequences. Problems
that need to be addressed include finding genes and other important
functional elements in DNA sequences, modelling and classifying these
elements, and modelling and classifying the RNA and protein sequences that
are derived from them.  Neural networks and hidden Markov models are two
types of models that have been proposed to satisfy this need. The intent
of this workshop is to explore the strengths and weaknesses of these and
related techniques for the analysis of DNA and protein sequences, from
both a mathematical and an empirical viewpoint.

                Provisional list of speakers includes:

	Stephen Altschul (NCBI)		Phil Green (Seattle)	
	Pierre Baldi (Caltech)		David Haussler (UCSC)	
	Philipp Bucher (Lausanne)	Liisa Holm (EBI)
	Soren Brunak (Denmark)		Anders Krogh (Denmark) 	
	Bill Bruno (Los Alamos)		Alan Lapedes (Santa Fe Inst) 
	Chris Burge (Stanford) 		Chip Lawrence (Albany, NY)
	Cyrus Chothia (Cambridge)	Jun Liu (Stanford)	
	Richard Durbin (Sanger Centre)	Graeme Mitchison (Cambridge)
	Sean Eddy (St Louis)		Victor Solovyev	(Sanger Centre)
	Mikhail Gelfand (Moscow)	Gary Stormo (Colorado)	
	Nick Goldman (Cambridge)

This workshop will form a component of the Newton Institute programme on
Neural Networks and Machine Learning, organised by C M Bishop, D Haussler,
G E Hinton, M Niranjan and L G Valiant. Further information about the
programme is available via the WWW at

            http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/programs/nnm.html

The workshop will commence at 4:30 p.m. on Monday 20 October and end at 
lunch time on Friday 24 October. 

Location and Costs: The workshop will be held in the Isaac Newton Institute.
Since space at the Institute is limited, participants are strongly
encouraged to register early. There will be a registration fee of 60 UK
pounds which will include the Conference Dinner on Thursday 23 October as
well as morning coffee and afternoon tea throughout the week.

Note that accommodation can be difficult to find in Cambridge at this
time of year. A limited number of rooms have been reserved and will be
offered to registrants on a first-come first-served basis.

   Registration forms are available from the workshop Web Page at

         http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/programs/nnmdna.html

Completed registration forms should be sent to Heather Dawson at the
Newton Institute, or by e-mail to h.dawson at newton.cam.ac.uk

    The deadline for registration and housing is 26 September 1997