Connectionists: 2nd CFP Machine Learning for Systems Biology (Extended deadline)

[Pierre Geurts]

** Our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **

SUBMISSION DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO JULY 6TH.




**************************** Call for Papers ***************************
  International Workshop on Machine Learning in Systems Biology
               24-25 September 2007, Evry (near Paris), France
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                        http://mlsb07.ibisc.fr

Motivation

Molecular biology and also all the biomedical sciences are undergoing
a true revolution as a result of the emergence and growing impact of a
series of new disciplines/tools sharing the “-omics” suffix in their
name.  These include in particular genomics, transcriptomics,
proteomics and metabolomics devoted respectively to the examination of
the entire systems of genes, transcripts, proteins and metabolites
present in a given cell or tissue type.

The availability of these new, highly effective tools for biological
exploration is dramatically changing the way one performs research in
at least two respects.  First of all, the amount of available
experimental data is not at all a limiting factor any more; on the
contrary, there is a plethora of it.  The challenge has shifted
towards identifying the relevant pieces of information given the
question, and how to make sense out of it (a “data mining” issue).
Secondly, rather than to focus on components in isolation, we can now
try to understand how biological systems behave as the result of the
integration and interaction between the individual components that one
can now monitor simultaneously (so called “systems biology”).

Taking advantage of this wealth of “genomic” information has become
a conditio sine qua non for whoever ambitions to remain competitive in
molecular biology and more generally in biomedical sciences. Machine
learning naturally appears as one of the main drivers of progress in
this context, where most of the targets of interest deal with complex
structured objects: sequences, 2D and 3D structures or interaction
networks. At the same time bioinformatics and systems biology have
already induced significant new developments of general interest in
machine learning, for example in the context of learning with
structured data, graph inference, semi-supervised learning, system
identification, and novel combinations of optimization and learning
algorithms.

Objective

The aim of this workshop is to contribute to the cross-fertilization
between the research in machine learning methods and their
applications to complex biological and medical questions by bringing
together method developers and experimentalists. We encourage
submissions bringing forward methods for discovering complex
structures (e.g. interaction networks, molecule structures) and
methods supporting genome-wide data analysis.

A non-exhaustive list of topics suitable for this workshop:

Methods

Machine Learning Algorithms
Bayesian Methods
Data integration/fusion
Feature/subspace selection
Clustering
Biclustering/association rules
Kernel Methods
Probabilistic Inference
Structured output prediction
Systems identification
Graph inference, completion, smoothing

Applications

Sequence Annotation
Gene Expression and post-transcriptional regulation
Inference of gene regulation networks
Gene Prediction and whole genome association studies
Metabolic pathway modeling
Signaling networks
Systems biology approaches to biomarker identification
Rational drug design methods
Metabolic Reconstruction
Protein Structure Prediction
Protein Function Prediction
Protein-protein interaction networks

Submissions

We invite to submit an extended abstract of maximum five pages,
formatted according to the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
style. Papers should be submitted online via the Easychair submission
system at http://www.easychair.org/MLSB07/.

The deadline for submissions is *July 6* (Extended)

The accepted submissions will be edited in the proceedings of the
workshop.  Further information concerning the workshop can be found on
the workshop web site http://mlsb07.ibisc.fr

Important dates

-       6 July: deadline for submissions
-       24 July: response to authors
-       25 August: camera-ready papers (extended abstracts)
-       24-25 September: workshop

Location

The workshop will take place at University of Evry,in the Genopole®
campus, located in Evry, at the heart of the Ile-de-France region, 25
km south of Paris. Evry has many transportation infrastructures (A6
and Francilienne highways, two RER regional train lines making it
possible to reach the center of Paris in 40 minutes) and the Orly and
Charles-de-Gaulle airports (15 km and 70 km away respectively).

Chairs :

Florence d’Alché-Buc, IBISC CNRS FRE 2873 & Université d’Evry, France
Louis Wehenkel, GIGA & Université de Liège, Belgique

Programme Committee

Florence d’Alché-Buc (University of Evry, France)
Christophe Ambroise (University of Evry, France)
Laurent Bréhelin (University of Montpellier, France)
Vincent Frouin (CEA, France)
Pierre Geurts (University of Liège, Belgium)
Mark Girolami (University of Glasgow, UK)
Samuel Kaski (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Kathleen Marchal (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Gunnar Raetsch (Max Planck Institute,Tuebingen)
Juho Rousu (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Céline Rouveirol (University of Paris XIII, France)
Yvan Saeys (University of Gent, Belgium)
Koji Tsuda (Max Planck Institute, Tuebingen)
Jacques Van Helden (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
Jean-Philippe Vert (Ecole des Mines, France)
Louis Wehenkel (University of Liège, Belgium)
Jean-Daniel Zucker(University of Paris XIII, France)