ISMB Conference Series

• ISMB 2012
• About ISMB
• ISMB Mission
• ISMB History
• Future ISMB
• ISCB/ECCB Collaboration

ISMB 2012 - Long Beach, California, USA, July 15-17, 2012

The 20th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2012) will be held in Long Beach, California, USA, July 15 - July 17, 2012, where over 1500 attendees are expected to participate in this milestone event.

ISMB specifically encourages an increased participation of scientists involved in experimental biology. This guiding goal positively impacted the organization of the ISMB, and ISMB/ECCB meetings when the conference is held jointly in Europe, in many ways, including through a Special Session Tracks for related disciplines, a Highlight Tracks for work published in journals frequented by experimental biologists, and a Late Breaking Research Track for the presentation of submitted abstracts of research in progress. When and where possible, a public lecture keynote presentation opens the conference to the local community, as was added to the conference agenda for the first time in 2010.

The 20th anniversary conference program will include over 40 contributed papers 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 on USB drive 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 700-800 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 more than 1500 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).

Uri Alon (Weizmann Inst of Sci; '04), Stephen Altschul (NCBI; '02), David Altschuler (Harvard; '10), Michale Ashburner (EBI-'02; U of Cambridge-'11), David Baker (U of Washington; '02), Amos Bairoch (U of Geneva; '99), David Balaban (Affymetrix; '99), Ewan Birney (EBI; '05), Bonnie Berger (MIT; '11), Mathieu Blanchette (McGill U; '06), Tom Blundell (U of Cambridge; '06), Steven Brenner (UC Berkeley; '10), Sydney Brenner (Salk Inst; '03), Søren Brunak (DTU; '07), Douglas Brutlag (Stanford; '95), 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), George Church (Harvard; '10), 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-NHGRI; '04), David Haussler (UCSC; '96 & '08), Barry Honig (Columbia U; '02), Leroy Hood (Inst for Sys Bio; '00 & '04), 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), Susan Lindquist (Whitehead Inst; '10), David Lipman (NIH-NCBI; '04), Matthias Mann (CEBI; '99 & '04), 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), Denis Noble (U of Oxford; '04), Erin O'Shea (HHMI; '07), Svante Paabo (Max-Planck Leipzig; '04 &'10), 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, MSKCC-'10), David Sankoff (Otttawa), Harold Scheraga (Cornell U; '00), Renee Schroeder (U of Vienna; '07), David Searls (SKB; '00), Eran Segal (Weizmann Inst; '07), Luis Serrano (Ctr for Genomic Regulation; '11), Temple Smith (Boston U; '07), Terry Speed (UC Berkely; '07), Michale J E Sternberg (Imperial Cancer Research Fund; '99), John Sulston (Sanger Ctr; '95), Janet Thornton (U College London-'95, EBI-'05 & '11), Anna Tramontano (U of Rome; '04), Olga Troyanskaya (Princeton; '11), Mathias Uhlen (KTH; '09), Alfonso Valencia (CNIO; '11), Craig Venter (Celera), Gunnar von Heijne (Stockholm Bioinformatics Center; '01 & '05), Michael Waterman (USC; '98 & '06), Robert Waterston (Washington U St. Louis; '96), Robert Weinberg (Whitehead Inst; '10), 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.

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

ISMB 2012 - July 15-17, Long Beach, California, USA (pre-conference SIGs, Tutorials and Student Council Symposium on July 13-14)

At the moment the following is the destination plan for years in which the dates and locations have not yet been confirmed. Each of the below is subject to change until listed as confirmed.

ISMB/ECCB 2013 (and every odd numbered year thereafter) - July in Europe (dates and locations TBA as they are confirmed)

ISMB 2014 - (and every odd numbered year thereafter) - July in North America (dates and locations TBA as they are confirmed)