Birds of a Feather (BoF)

ISMB 2010 will offer a number of "spontaneous" open meetings for participants to meet and talk about topics of mutual interest.

The "Birds-of-a-feather" (BoF) meetings are a long-standing, highly successful tradition at ISMB. Conference participants are encouraged to submit a topic for discussion to this website and to recruit as many (or as few) interested participants as desired by the topic leader.

The conference organizers have set aside several rooms specifically for birds-of-a-feather meetings. The BoFs will be available on Monday, July 12 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.) and Tuesday, July 13 (1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.)

Birds of a feather submissions are now closed.

ISMB Killer App Award

Submissions for the ISMB Killer App Award should be made online here by Saturday, June 12, 2010.

The ISMB Killer App Award promotes the development of bioinformatics tools and services of substantial practical value to the biological research community.

Chairs: Anita de Waard, Elsevier, USA and Seán O’Donoghue, EMBL, Germany

We are very pleased to present the first ever ISMB Killer App Award in Boston to the individual or team that presents a tool/system that would be judged to be of most practical benefit to biochemists and molecular biologists

To be eligible, your system must be presented at ISMB 2010 as either a poster or talk, and must be fully functional. To submit your work, complete the online sign-up form mentioning your poster number or talk title, and providing a short explanation (500 words max.) of how your tool benefits today’s busy biologist. Be as specific as you can: if you have done user studies, describe them; if you have anecdotal evidence, mention it; if you have a website or paper detailing the user feedback, include it. If you have it, give user or web access statitics.

A panel of expert judges will select three finalists who will be invited to give a short talk as part of a Technology Track session at ISMB 2010. The winner will receive an Apple iPad and their work will possibly be integrated and featured on Elsevier’s platforms.

The ISMB Killer App Award is generously sponsored by ScienceDirect.

Through its Applications initiative, Elsevier is looking at how, in the contemporary scientific environment, we can meet the challenge to provide efficient search and discovery of scientific content, and create a new publishing ecosystem that is integrated, intelligent, collaborative, trustworthy and open to innovative applications.

Travel Fellowship Information

Funding Information

Student Council Symposium (SCS6)

The 6th ISCB Student Council Symposium is a student-organized event featuring keynote lectures, oral presentations and a poster session. In addition to previous years, a career event will be organized with a variety of distinguished speakers from industry and academia. The Symposium is tailored mainly to undergraduate and graduate students as well as post-docs in computational biology and related disciplines. This is once again a unique opportunity to meet fellow students and researchers for networking and exchange of ideas in a great setting.

The Agenda is posted here.

Abstracts can be submitted through the ISCB submission system. Please follow the submission guidelines carefully as abstract that do not meet this requirements will be returned without review.

Visual Reflections on Science

Annual Art & Science Exhibition

The Art and Science Exhibition, or also known as the Visual Reflections on Science, is an event organized by the ISCB Student Council, a student-led section of ISCB whose mission is the development of the next generation of computational biologists. Submission details are available here (http://www.iscb.org/ismb2010-submission-details/ismb2010-artandscienceexhibition)

Late Breaking Research Track (LBR) Overview

Late Breaking Research Chair: John Quackenbush, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA

Click Here for Submissions

ISMB 2010 will bring together Bioinformaticians and Computational Biologists working in a wide range of disciplines, including molecular biology, biology, medicine, computer science, mathematics and statistics.

The LBR Track provides authors an opportunity to submit late breaking research to ISMB delegates. Presentations run in parallel to other conference sessions and presenters will be given a 20-minute time slot (plus 5 minutes for questions) in the conference schedule to provide a summary and update to their work.

Submissions and evaluation criteria:

Authors are to provide a 2 page, total, extended abstract of their work, including one (1) figure (11pt font, 1.5-inch margins). Submitters may choose to provide a link to a short (<=5min) video (eg. youtube) of them presenting their work, to assess presentation skills. Submissions will also be evaluated on the potential for an excellent and interesting presentation. Significance, interest to the bioinformatics community, and biological/medical impact would be the key evaluation criteria. Each submitter must provide a title, a short one (1) paragraph public abstract for inclusion in the electronic conference program and website. A one or two (1 or 2) sentence summary of novelty and significance of the work is to be included. During the submission process you will be able to confirm if your work will also to be presented as a poster.

For more information please contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Call for Tutorials

Tutorial Committee:

Janet Kelso, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Fran Lewitter, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, USA

Click here to complete a submission for an ISMB 2010 Tutorial.

This call is an invitation to scientists and professionals working in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology to submit high quality tutorials for presentation at ISMB 2010.

Tutorials should be designed as half-day (four hour) sessions, including a 30 minute break. Only tutorials covering a range of topics reflecting the multi-disciplinary nature of our field will be considered for acceptance.

Tutorials in the following areas are particularly encouraged:

(1)  High throughtput sequencing platforms - an analysis of sources of error and algorithms for mapping and / or assembly

(2)  Genomic variation analyses - how to identify CNVs, rearrangements and SNPs

(3)  General Purpose GPU for high performance computing

(4)  Cloud computing and data storage for bioinformatics

(5) comparative genomics analysis

(6) computational methods for predicting miRNAs, their targets and their function within the cell

(7) computational approaches to high throughput microscopy analysis

Tutorials take the form of presentations that may include practical components where appropriate.

The purpose of the tutorial program is to provide participants with lectures and instruction covering either well-established or new "cutting-edge" topics, relevant to the bioinformatics field. It offers participants an opportunity to get an introduction to important established topics in bioinformatics, to learn about new areas of bioinformatics research, or to develop advanced skills in areas about which they are already knowledgeable. Tutorials serve an educational function and are expected to provide a balanced perspective on a field of research. They should not focus on the presenters' own research or software. Please note that if you wish to focus your talk on a specific software package, your proposal should be submitted to the Technology Track. These presentations do not fall into the Tutorial format.

Tutorial submissions should be received by Friday, December 11, 2009. Proposals should not exceed a maximum of 4 pages, and must include a detailed description of what will be taught.

Proposals should contain the following information:

Tutorial attendees often consider the reputation and standing of the presenters as one of their criteria for choosing particular sessions. It is therefore expected that the presenters listed on the submitted proposal will attend the conference to present their tutorials.

Submitters of successful tutorial proposals will be notified of their acceptance by Monday, December 21, 2009. ISMB tutorial presenters may also be invited to develop tutorials for publication in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

Final materials for reproduction must be received by Monday, May 10, 2010. The slides may be submitted as PowerPoint or PDF files, and the accompanying notes should be PDF files.

ISMB  2010 – Call for Conference Workshop Proposals

** Workshop Submission Form **

Conference Workshop Track Chair: Jill Mesirov, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, USA

Workshops are two hour sessions held during ISMB 2010 and covers a broad interest of topics not primarily research oriented. The purpose of the workshop track is to bring together people with common interests to discuss defined topics. Workshops are viewed as sessions with more structure than the "Birds of a Feather" (BoF) and a format that can include mulitple talks and ample discussion time. Previous workshops have included Funding Opportunities, Education in Bioinformatics, and Bioinformatics Core Facilities.

Technical instructions:

Workshops run the same schedule as all other parallel tracks. They must be designed as half-day sessions (2 hours) and synchronized with other tracks. The regular presentation unit is 30 minutes consisting of 20 minute talks + 5 minute discussion + 5 minutes for movement between parallel tracks. Workshops may include any form of presentation such as talks or panel discussions.

Preference will be given to topics of wide interest to attendees, with a planned program agenda that is not primarily made up of research paper presentations. Potential fields of interest include Funding Opportunities, Education in Bioinformatics (sponsored by the Education committee), and Bioinformatics Core Facilities. Additional topics of particular interest to the ISMB community or those sponsored by ISCB committees are welcome.

Proposals for Workshops should be submitted via the online submission system here prior to Friday, February 12, 2010.

Submissions must include up to a one-page description of the topic, its relevance to the ISMB community, and the reasons for planning a workshop on this topic at ISMB 2010.  These explanations could be followed by a list of topics for possible presentations with one-paragraph descriptions. Finally, a draft time schedule for the workshop should be presented. A finalized list of speaker names is not necessary but may add validity to the proposal. If you list invited speakers as "accepted", please make sure that they agree to speak understanding the financial constraints described below. Submitters should briefly describe their qualification/experience in organizing a workshop.

Workshop chairs and speakers must pay their expenses including registration to participate at the meeting. Therefore, the organizers highly encourage workshop organizers to seek independent funding, and to include any commitment that they may have secured in the proposal. ISMB will help in the administrative aspects of assigning the rooms, announcements and adding the detailed schedule to the conference program. Note that the ISMB cannot financially support the speakers or the workshop organizers.

All submissions will be evaluated by a committee,which will consider the following criteria:

• Relevance, interest, and value of the topic to ISMB attendees.
• Complementarity to the ISMB program provided by the other tracks.
• Completeness, clarity, and quality of the workshop proposal.
• Qualification of the submitter(s) to organize the workshop.
• Likely success of the proposed workshop.
• Overlap with other proposal or pre-selected activity.

Submitters of successful workshop proposals will be notified of their provisional acceptance by Friday, February 26, 2010.

The detailed schedule, names and affiliations of speakers, presentation titles and short abstract must be provided before April 23, 2010.

Art & Science Exhibition

**Call for Arts and Science Submission Site*

Chair: Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern, Spanish National Cancer Research Center, Madrid, Spain

The Art & Science Exhibition, or also known as the Visual Reflections on Science, is an event organized by the ISCB Student Council, a student-led section of ISCB whose mission is the development of the next generation of computational biologists.

ISMB 2010 will bring together scientists from a wide range of disciplines, including biology, medicine, computer science, mathematics and statistics. In these fields we are constantly dealing with information in visual form: from microscope images and photographs of gels to scatter plots, network graphs and phylogenetic trees, structural formulae and protein models to flow diagrams, visual aids for problem-solving are omnipresent. Some of the works of the annual exhibitions at the ISMB conferences combine outstanding beauty and aesthetics with deep insight that perfectly proves the validity of our approach or goes beyond the problem's solution. Others were surprising and inspiring through the transition from science to art, opening our eyes and minds to reflect on the work that we are undertaking.

For the ISMB 2010 Art & Science Exhibition the organizers invite all interested conference attendees (hereafter referred to as "artists") to submit such images and videos ("artworks") that have been generated as part of a research project. They are also soliciting images and videos resulting from creative efforts that involve scientific concepts or employ scientific tools and methods.

Participate in this exciting event to surprise and inspire us, to open our eyes and minds.

Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern (Chair)
Noura Chelbat
Nils Gehlenborg
Magali Michaut
Venkata Satagopam

Michal Linial
Burkhard Rost
Alfonso Valencia

All questions pertaining to the Art & Science Exhibition should be directed to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Art & Science Exhibition will take place for the duration of conference. A space has been set aside where the submitted artwork can be viewed in a relaxed atmosphere off the hectic hustle and bustle of the conference.

Artists are asked to submit images and videos for this exhibition. Videos will be projected in the exhibition space. Images will be shown both in physical form and projected as part of a slide show during the conference breaks. It is planned to incorporate parts of the exhibition into other ISMB 2010 events such as the opening reception, keynote talks or the awards ceremony. It is also being considered to display images from the exhibition throughout the whole conference venue.

Images presented in physical form and videos will automatically enter a contest for a $200 (USD) award unless the artist indicates during the submission process that the work should be excluded from the contest.

ISMB 2010 delegates will select the winner of the contest through majority vote based on their personal preference. Each delegate will have one vote.

An artist can be an individual or a group of individuals. Each artist may submit video or images for presentation in physical form and projection. The artist has to indicate during submission of images if the image is to be presented in physical form. If the artist submits multiple images for presentation in physical form there is no guarantee that all images will be displayed based on exhibition space. Space for physical presentation of images is limited and will be assigned on a first-come first-served basis.

If you can not attend the conference but still have artworks to present on the Art & Science exhibition please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for further information.

The artwork may deal with any theme in science but the organizers are particularly interested in work that is reflecting on topics related to Computational and Molecular Biology. While artistic freedom is a primary concern of the organizers the nature of the event requires certain restrictions on the content of the artwork. Artwork that contains sexual, political or religious themes cannot be accepted into the exhibition and will be rejected. Works created for commercial purposes will also be rejected.

The final artwork has to be submitted for review before the deadline through the online submission system. Together with the artwork a brief description of the work has to be submitted as well as a title for the work. The description must not be longer than 150 words.

Videos have to be in MPEG format only and no more than 4 minutes long. The file size of the video must not exceed 100 MB. It must be possible to decode videos with standard software. The maximum resolution for videos is 1024x768 pixels. Videos may include sound.

Images to be presented in physical form must be smaller than 43 x 43 (109.2 cm x 109.2 cm). They must not be deeper than 0.5 (1.2 cm) and must be attachable to a poster board using velcro. The organizers recommend to leave a sufficiently wide border around the artwork and to carefully consider the size of photos and the amount of detail included in images. All images must be submitted in their final form and resolution. In case of images employing non-digital media a high-resolution digital photo of the artwork has to be submitted. Images can be submitted in PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF or PDF format. The file size must not exceed 25 MB. Artists whose images are accepted into the exhibition for presentation in physical form will have to bring the final images to the conference. For projection images will be scaled down to a resolution of 1024x768 pixels. The aspect ratio will be maintained. The organizers recommend keeping this in mind when designing images that are submitted for projection only.

Online submission system

All submitted artwork will be reviewed for compliance with content restrictions as well as technical requirements. Artwork out of compliance will be rejected. Furthermore, the organizers reserve the right to reject artwork for any reasons.

The artist must be holding the copyrights for all parts of the artwork or have permission from the copyright holders to use their works. Copyright holders other than the artist must be attributed accordingly in the abstract accompanying the artwork.

By submitting artwork to the Art and Science Exhibition the artist gives permission to the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) to display this work and reproductions thereof during ISMB 2010 and in materials associated with this and future ISCB events, such as program booklets, (electronic) newsletters, promotional brochures and websites.

Video examples
http://accad.osu.edu/research/scientific_visualization_htmls/dancingDNA.htm
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/sb/faculty_pages/Sussman/movies/richardnew.mpg


Image Examples

Rotem Bar-Or
The Weizmann Institute of Science, ISRAEL
Nebulous Distance

ISMB 2008 -first prize

Mr. Jared Flatow
Northwestern University, USA
A Portrait of James D. Watson in his own Words

http://www.iscb.org/ismb2008/ismb2008_includes/images/vrs/3225.pdf