MLCB 09 "New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology", call for contribution]

Subject: MLCB 09 "New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology",call for contribution]To: SCIC Call for contributions New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology http://www.mlcb.org A workshop at the Twenty-Third Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2009) Whistler, BC, Canada, December 11 or 12, 2009.Deadline for submission of extended abstracts: September 27, 2009,WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONThe field of computational biology has seen dramatic growth overthe past few years, in terms of newly available data, newscientific questions and new challenges for learning andinference. In particular, biological data is often relationallystructured and highly diverse, and thus requires combining multipleweak evidence from heterogeneous sources. These sources includesequenced genomes of a variety of organisms, gene expression datafrom multiple technologies, protein sequence and 3D structuraldata, protein interaction data, gene ontology and pathwaydatabases, genetic variation data (such as SNPs), and an enormousamount of text data in the biological and medical literature. Thesenew types of scientific and clinical problems require novel
supervised and unsupervised learning approaches that can use thesegrowing resources.The workshop will host presentations of emerging problems andmachine learning techniques in computational biology. We encouragecontributions describing either progress on new bioinformaticsproblems or work on established problems using methods that aresubstantially different from standard approaches. Kernel methods,graphical models, semi-supervised approaches, feature selectionand other techniques applied to relevant bioinformatics problemswould all be appropriate for the workshop.SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONSResearchers interested in contributing should upload an extendedabstract of 1-6 pages in PDF format to the MLCB submission websitehttp://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mlcb2009by September27,2009, 11:59pm (Samoa time).No special style is required. Authors may use the NIPS style file, butare also free to use other styles as long as they use standard fontsize (11-12 pt) and margins (1 in).All submissions will be anonymously peer reviewed and will beevaluated on the basis of their technical content. A strongsubmission to the workshop typically presents a new learning methodthat yields new biological insights, or applies an existing learningmethod to a new biological problem. However, submissions that improveupon existing methods for solving previously studied problems willalso be considered. Examples of research presented in previous yearscan be found online athttp://www.mlcb.org/nipscompbio/previous/.Please note that accepted abstracts will be posted online
atwww.mlcb.org. Authors may submit two versions of their abstract, alonger version for review and a shorter version for posting to the webpage. In addition, presentations will be video taped and publishedonline as part of the videolectures.net website supported by Pascal.The workshop allows submissions of papers that are under review orhave been recently published in a conference or a journal. This isdone to encourage presentation of mature research projects that areinteresting to the community. The authors should clearly state anyoverlapping published work at time of submission. Authors ofaccepted abstracts will be invited to submit full length versionsof their contributions for publication in a special issue of BMCBioinformatics.ORGANIZERS Gal Chechik, Google Research Tomer Hertz, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center William Stafford Noble, Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington Yanjun Qi, Machine Learning Department, NEC Research Jean-Philippe Vert, Mines ParisTech, Institut Curie Alexander Zien, LIFE BiosystemsPROGRAM COMMITTEEMathieu Blanchette, McGill UniversityFlorence d'Alche-Buc, Université d'Evry-Val d'Essonne, Genopole,Eleazar Eskin, UC Los Angeles,Nir Friedman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ,David Heckerman, Microsoft Research ,Michael I. Jordan, UC Berkeley ,Christina Leslie, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center,
Michal Linial, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ,Quaid Morris, University of Toronto,Klaus-Robert Müller, Fraunhofer FIRST ,Dana Pe'er, Columbia University ,Uwe Ohler, Duke University ,Günnar Rätsch, Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max PlanckSociety,Alexander Schliep, Rutgers University,Koji Tsuda, Computational Biology Research CenterEric Xing, Carnegie-Mellon University ,--Magali Michaut, PhDhttp://baderlab.org/MagaliMichaut