Connectionists: CFP: 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
     http://www.mlcb.org

on the 7th or 8th of December at NIPS'07 in Whistler, B.C. (http:// 
nips.cc).

If you would like to contribute then please send an extended abstract
by *October 15, 11:59am (Samoa time)* to
nips-compbio at tuebingen.mpg.de (details below).

I am looking forward to meet you there!

Gunnar Raetsch



	  New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology

			 http://www.mlcb.org


	 A workshop at the Twenty-First Annual Conference on
	  Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2007)
	    Whistler, BC, Canada, December 7-8, 2007.


Deadline for submission of extended abstracts: October 15, 2007


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

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

The workshop will host presentations of emerging problems and machine  
learning techniques 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 1-6 pages in PDF format to nips-compbio at tuebingen.mpg.de  
by October 15, 2007, 11:59pm (Samoa time).

No special style is required.  Authors may use the NIPS style file,  
but are also free to use other styles as long as they use standard  
font size (11-12 pt) and margins.

All submissions will be anonymously peer reviewed and will be  
evaluated on the basis of their technical content.  A strong  
submission to the workshop typically presents a new learning method  
that yields new biological insights, or applies an existing learning  
method to a new biological problem.  However, submissions that  
improve upon existing methods for solving previously studied problems  
will also be considered.

Please note that accepted abstracts will be posted at http:// 
www.mlcb.org.  Authors may submit two versions of their abstract, a  
longer version for review and a shorter version for posting to the  
web page.

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. Authors of accepted  
abstracts will be invited to submit full length versions of their  
contributions for publication in a special issue of BMC Bioinformatics.


ORGANIZERS

Gal Chechik, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University

Christina Leslie, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

William Stafford Noble, Department of Genome Sciences, University of  
Washington

Gunnar Raetsch, Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck  
Society (Tuebingen, Germany)

Quaid Morris, Terrence Donnelley Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular  
Research, University of Toronto

Koji Tsuda, Max Planck Institute for biological Cybernetics  
(Tuebingen, Germany)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Pierre Baldi, UC Irvine
Kristin Bennett, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Mathieu Blanchette, McGill University
Florence d'Alche, Universite d'Evry-Val d'Essonne, Genopole
Eleazar Eskin, UCLA
Brendan Frey, University of Toronto
Nir Friedman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Michael I. Jordan, UC Berkeley
Alexander Hartemink, Duke University
Michal Linial, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Klaus-Robert Mueller, Fraunhofer FIRST
Uwe Ohler, Duke University
Alexander Schliep, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics
Bernhard Schoelkopf, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
Eran Segal, The Weizmann Institute
Jean-Philippe Vert, Ecole des Mines de Paris


+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
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