ISMB Conference Series

• ISMB 2010
• About ISMB
• ISMB Mission
• ISMB History
• Future ISMB
• ISCB/ECCB Collaboration

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 proceedings published as part of an online-only issue of the Oxford University Press journal Bioinformatics and are distributed in CD form to all attendees 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.

The ISMB conferences began in 1993 and were the driving force behind the founding of the International Society for Computational Biology in 1997, which has been organizing this conference ever since. ISCB is the only society representing computational biology on a worldwide scale and its flagship conference ISMB has become the largest conference on computational biology worldwide. ISCB continues to see ISMB as its major flagship annual event.

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.

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 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 speakers are listed below (affiliations are accurate to the year the keynote was given).

Stephen Altschul (NCBI; '02), Michale Ashburner (EBI; '02), David Baker (U of Washington; '02), Amos Bairoch (U of Geneva; '99), David Balaban (Affymetrix; '99), Ewan Birney (EBI; '05), Mathieu Blanchette (McGill U; '06), Tom Blundell (U of Cambridge; '06), Sydney Brenner (Salk Inst; '03), Søren Brunak (DTU; '07), Bruce Buchanan (U of Pittsburg; '94), Chris Burge (MIT; '01), Stephen Burley (SGX; '07), Howard Cash (Gene Codes; '05), Robert Cedergren (U of Montreal; '98), Elena Conti (EMBL; '06), Eugenia Maria del Pino Veintimilla (PUCE; '09), Charles DeLisi (Boston U; '06), Christopher Dobson (U of Oxford; '01), Ford Doolittle (Dalhousie U; '02), Russell Doolittle (UCSD; '96), Sean Eddy (Washington U; '01), Gerald Edelman (Neurosciences Inst; '00), Manfred Eigen (Max-Planck Goettingen; '99), Michael Eisen (Berkely; '07), David Eisenberg (UCLA; '01), Claire Fraser-Liggett (U of Maryland; '08), Terry Gaasterland (Rockefeller U; '02), Anne-Claude Gavin (EMBL; '07), Pierre-Henri Gouyon (MNHN/CNRS; '09), Eric Green (NIH), David Haussler (UCSC; '96 & '08), Barry Honig (Columbia U; '02), Leroy Hood (Inst for Sys Bio; '00), Robert Huber (Max-Planck Munich; '06), Bernardo Huberman (Hewlett Packard Labs; '01), Peter J Hunter (U of Auckland; '05), Lawrence Hunter (NLM; '94); Trey Ideker (UCSD; '09), David Jaffe (Broad Inst; '08), Fotis Kafatos (EMBL; '07), Minoru Kanehisa (Kyoto U; '00), Richard Karp (U of Washington; '99), Anthony Kerlavage (Celera; '99), Daphne Koller (Stanford; '09), Eugene Koonin (NCBI/NLM; '99), Eric Lander (MIT), Richard Lathrop (UC Irvine; '97), Thomas Lengauer (Max-Planck Saarbrucken; '09), Mike Levine (UC Berkeley), David Lipman (NCBI), Matthias Mann (CEBI; '99), Hanah Margalit (Hebrew U of Jerusalem; '08), John Mattick (Queensland; '07), J Andrew McCammon (UCSD; '00), Marcie McClure (U of Nevada; '97), Jill Mesirov (Broad Inst; '05); Webb Miller (PA State U; '09), Satoru Miyano (U of Tokyo; '05), Gene Myers (Celera-'00 & HMMI-'08), Erin O'Shea (HHMI; '07), Svante Paabo (Max-Planck Leipzig), Bernard O Palsson (UCSD; '08), Morag Park (McGill; '08), Pavel Pevzner (UCSD; '05), Tomaso Poggio (MIT; '09), Aviv Regev (Broad Inst; '08), John Reinitz (SUNY; '02), Isidore Rigoutsos (IBM; '02), Richard J Roberts (New England Biolabs; '94 & '06), Gerald Rubin (HHMI), Chris Sander (EMBL-'96 & MIT-'01), David Sankoff (Otttawa), Harold Scheraga (Cornell U; '00), Renee Schroeder (U of Vienna; '07), David Searls (SKB; '00), Eran Segal (Weizmann Inst; '07), Temple Smith (Boston U; '07), Terry Speed (UC Berkely; '07), Michale J E Sternberg (Imperial Cancer Research Fund; '99), John Sulston (Hinxton), Janet Thornton (EBI; '05), Mathias Uhlen (KTH; '09), Craig Venter (Celera), Gunnar von Heijne (Stockholm Bioinformatics Center; '01 & '05), Michael Waterman (USC; '98 & '06), Robert Waterston (Washington U St. Louis; '96), Hans Westerhoff (Vrije U; '97), Shoshana Wodak (U of Brussells; '98), Kurt Wuethrich (ETH; '06).

Past ISMB Conferences - click here.

Future ISMB conference locations are being confirmed as early as possible, so please stay tuned and revisit often.

At the moment the following is the destination plan, subject to change:

ISMB/ECCB 2011 - July 17-19, Vienna, Austria (pre-conference SIGs, Tutorials and Student Council Symposium on July 15-16)