ISMB Conference Series

• ISMB 2012 - Celebrating 20 Years!
  
• ISMB/ECCB 2011
  
• About ISMB
  
• ISMB Mission
• ISMB History
• Future ISMB
• ISCB/ECCB Collaboration
  

The Nineteenth Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2011) will be held jointly with the Tenth Annual European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) in Vienna, Austria, July 17 - July 19, 2011, where we expect >1500 attendees.

Since ISMB 2008 in Toronto we have encouraged an increased participation of scientists involved in experimental biology. This guiding goal positively impacted the organization of the ISMB and ECCB meetings in many ways, including through the introduction of 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. And the 2010 addition of a public lecture keynote presentation opened the conference to the local community for the very first time.

The Vienna 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 in USB-stick 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 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).

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: