Connectionists: Call for papers: NIPS-08 Workshop on Machine Learning in Computational Biology

[Gal Chechik]

                        Call for contributions

          New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology

                         http://www.mlcb.org


         A workshop at the Twenty-Second Annual Conference on
          Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2008)
            Whistler, BC, Canada, December 12, 2008.



Deadline for submission of extended abstracts: October 12, 2008


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.

This year the workshop will follow a mini-symposium on Computational
Biology that will take place in Vancouver on the afternoon of
Thursday Dec 11th.


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Researchers interested in contributing should upload an extended
abstract of 1-6 pages in PDF format to the MLCB submission web site
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mlcb2008 by October 12,
2008, 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 standard margins (same as the NIPS style file).

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. Examples of research presented in previous years
can be found online at www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/nipscompbio/previous.

Please note that accepted abstracts will be posted online at
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. In addition, presentations will be video taped and published
online as part of the videolectures.net website supported by Pascal.

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,
         Google Research
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


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
David Heckerman, Microsoft Research
Michal Linial, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Klaus-Robert Mueller, Fraunhofer FIRST
Uwe Ohler, Duke University
Dana Pe'er, Columbia 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
Eric Xing, Carnegie Mellon University