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The Eighteenth International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2010) will be Boston, Massachusettes, USA, July 11 - July 13, 2010, where we expect 1400 attendees.
At ISMB/ECCB 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden and ISMB 2008 in Toronto we encouraged an increased participation of scientists involved in experimental biology and those researching in industry. This guiding goal positively impacted the organization of these meetings in many ways, including through the introduction of Special Session Tracks for related disciplines, a special Industry Track, Highlight Tracks for work published in journals frequented by experimental biologists. An increase in the number of keynote presentations provided insights into open areas of research from experimental perspectives.
The Boston conference program will include 46 contributed papers that have been selected by an international program committee during a rigorous review process rivaling the editorial procedure for top-rate scientific journals with an acceptance rate of ~19%. Contributed papers are collected in a volume published as an online-only issue of the Oxford University Press Journal Bioinformatics and are available for purchase in print at the conference. Several parallel tracks are not tied to publication in the conference proceedings, and therefore offer experimentalists and industry researchers, as well as mainstream ISMB attendees additional opportunities to present their work at the conference. A further point in the program is an extensive and lively poster session; at recent ISMB conferences 600-1,000 posters have been presented.
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The ISMB conference series aims at attracting the top research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology. Typical, but not exclusive, the topics of interest are: Sequence analysis, Evolution and phylogeny, Comparative genomics, Protein structure, Molecular and supramolecular dynamics, Molecular evolution, Gene regulation and transcriptomics, Proteomics, Systems biology, Ontologies, data bases and data integration, Text mining and information extraction, and Human health. The conference also aims to attract participants from related disciplines in order to understand the need that exists for computational approaches in related fields, and to gain from approaches taken in other disciplines that might be appropriate for computational biology.
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The Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, known today as simply ISMB, was started in the early 1990's to bring together researchers with an interest in applying a computational approach to biological investigation. At that time it was challenging to find people who did this work in either computer science or molecular biology, as few scientists in either discipline had a clear idea of what bioinformatics was or how to find other people doing it.
Therefore, Lawrence Hunter, then a programmer at the US National Library of Medicine, put to use a popular database he had generated of researchers interested in artificial intelligence and molecular biology from research papers and conference mailing lists by inviting those researchers to a 1992 joint NLM meeting with the National Science Foundation on the future of what was then termed artificial intelligence in molecular biology. The following year, the meeting evolved into the first Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), held in Washington DC. That first ISMB attracted approximately 200 scientists; today nearly 2000 show up.
Past keynote addresses. One of the highlights of each ISMB and ECCB conference is a collection of keynotes delivered by researchers of the highest international esteem who are asked to inform the community of historical perspectives or landmark advances in computational and experimental research, and inject new directions into the field of computational molecular biology. Past keynote addresses included:
Stephen Altschul (NCBI), Tom Blundell (Cambridge), Sydney Brenner (Salk), Søren Brunak (DTU Denmark), Stephen Burley (SGX), Ford Doolittle (Dalhousie), Russell Doolittle (UCSD), Manfred Eigen (Goettingen), Michael Eisen (Berkely), David Eisenberg (UCLA), Eric Green (NIH), Barry Honig (Columbia), Leroy Hood (Seattle), Robert Huber (Munich), Bernardo Huberman (Hewlett Packard Labs), Eric Lander (MIT), Mike Levine (Berkeley), David Lipman (NCBI), John Mattick (Queensland), Gene Myers (HMM), Erin O'Shea (HHMI), Svante Paabo (Leipzig), Richard Roberts (Ipswich), Gerald Rubin (HHMI), David Sankoff (Otttawa), Harold Scheraga (Cornell), Temple Smith (Boston Univ), Terry Speed (Berkely), John Sulston (Hinxton), Janet Thornton (EBI), Craig Venter (Celera), Gunnar von Heijne (Stockholm), Michael Waterman (USC), Kurt Wuethrich (ETH).
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