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ISCB NEWSLETTER November 24, 1999 - Vol. 2 #9
  1. ISCB MEMBERSHIP AND SUBSCRIPTION UPDATES
  2. QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY COMPUTER SCIENCE POSITION
  3. STANFORD BIOINFORMATICS ONLINE COURSES--10% OFF
  4. NEW AFFILIATED PUBLICATION: BRIEFINGS IN BIOINFORMATICS
  5. STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING POSITION
  6. ISMB 2000 - 1ST CALL FOR PAPERS
  7. DRAFT ISCB PRIVACY POLICY STATEMENT

ISCB MEMBERSHIP AND SUBSCRIPTION UPDATES
There has been some confusion about ISCB subscription benefits, and we are still improving the procedures we follow with the publishers. We have put together our own membership renewal system and you should have already receive a notice. We hope that this article clears up any other confusion. First, subscription benefits, like ISCB membership itself, are provided on a calendar year basis, that is, membership and associated subscriptions run from January 1 to December 31 no matter when during the year you join. If you join the Society after the last issue of the journal has been published for the year, you will be automatically enrolled for the following year. As stated above, individual membership renewals were sent out 11/30. Using our web renewal form will be the best way to ensure getting the Society discounts on all publications. Recently, Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Society journal Bioinformatics, updated its computer systems, and this disruption may have affected some of our members' online access to Bioinformatics during the months of September and October. We and OUP both deeply apologize for any delays or inconveniences that were caused during this time. If you have any problems with accessing your online subscription to Bioinformatics, please let us know. We will try to track down the problem by contacting OUP and obtaining the proper Subscriber number. Basic membership includes electronic access to the Society journal, Bioinformatics. Oxford University Press sends you an eight digit subscriber number shortly after joining the Society by regular mail, or if you contact them by email shortly after you register, they will send it to you by email [whitesa@oup.co.uk; maulee@oup.co.uk]. Although we are still using a manual method for getting new subscriptions to OUP, we hope to automate the process so that your subscriber number and access to the journal is effective immediately after payment of your dues. As an ISCB member you can also take advantage and get the benefits of subscribing to another affiliated Society publication, the Journal of Computational Biology. There is now an electronic version of this journal available to members at a very reasonable price. The discounted print version is also still available. To renew your membership, or to join ISCB as a first time member for the January-December 2000 membership year, please visit http://www.iscb.org/registration.html. We appreciate your patience with us as we work out these growing pains. If you have any questions or problems, please contact the Society administrator, Janice Cole.
Larry Hunter
ISCB President

QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY
Position in Computing and Information Science Department of Computing and Information Science The Department of Computing and Information Science invites applications for two tenure-track positions at the Assistant Professor or Associate Professor levels. Queen's University is one of the top universities in Canada and is well known for the high quality of its students and faculty. Queen's University is situated in Kingston, a beautiful and historic city, which is located on Lake Ontario within easy travelling distance of Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Syracuse. Kingston offers the amenities of a large city and the comfort of a small city. The Department of Computing and Information Science, which has 23 faculty, 16 staff and approximately 80 graduate students, is committed to excellence in both research and teaching. The faculty are doing research in a number of areas of computer science including computational imagery, molecular scene analysis, computer-assisted surgery, robotics and perception, software technology, database systems, computer networks, computational geometry, parallel computation and computational linguistics. The department offers undergraduate programs in computer science, cognitive science, and software design. It also hopes to begin a new undergraduate program in biomedical computing. Applicants for the tenure-track positions should have a Ph.D. degree in computer science or a related field. The Department will consider applicants in software engineering, intelligent systems, parallel and distributed systems and database systems. Applicants in the area of software engineering and applicants in the four general areas whose research has applications to medical computing or bioinformatics are particularly encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will be expected to develop an active research program and to teach effectively at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applicants are requested to send a curriculum vitae, including a list of publications and the names of three references, and copies of up to three recent papers to Dr. Janice Glasgow, Chair, Department of Computing and Information Science, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6. Openings are for July 2000 and beyond. Screening of applicants will begin immediately and continue until all positions are filled. Queen's University is committed to employment equity and welcomes applications from all qualified men and women, including visible minorities, aboriginal people, persons with disabilities, gay men and lesbians.


Stanford Bioinformatics and other ONLINE internet courses available at discount
We are pleased to announce that ISCB members will receive a 10% discount on the price of non-credit courses taken in the Stanford University Bioinformatics and Clinical Informatics short course series. These five courses are available online via streaming video and include: Computational Molecular Biology, taught by Doug Brutlag, Protein Architecture, Dynamics, and Structure Prediction by Michael Levitt, and Representations and Algorithms for Computational Molecular Biology by Russ Altman and John Koza. More information about these non-credit courses can be found at: http://scpd.stanford.edu/smiseries.html. These three courses are also available as part of a more formal certificate program in Bioinformatics, see: http://scpd.stanford.edu/ce/ndp/certificate/bioinformatics.html


New affiliated publication: BRIEFINGS IN BIOINFORMATICS
We are pleased to announce that ISCB members will receive a 10% discount on new subscriptions to BRIEFINGS IN BIOINFORMATICS, a new international, quarterly journal that will provide guidance on how to exploit new resources, focusing on the needs of bioinformatics software and database users and offering methodologies for specified tasks. The aim of the journal is not to present original research but to provide guides to users of existing databases. Published by Henry Stewart Publications, and edited by Martin Bishop, Head of Bioinformatics at MRC Human Genome Mapping Project Research Centre, Cambridge, UK, Briefings in Bioinformatics is guided by an international editorial board from pharmaceuticals, biotech companies, universities and research institutes. You can find a list of the editorial board, and a list of the peer-reviewed, hands-on articles scheduled for the inaugural volume, on the journal's webpage, www.henrystewart.com/journals/bib. For more information, visit www.henrystewart.com/journals/bib, mailto:ed@hspublications.co.uk, or phone Henry Stewart Publications in the UK on +44 (020) 7323 2916 or in the US on +001 800-633-4931. Members should mark their hardcopy order form as "ISCB member, 10% discount" to collect the discount. For online subscriptions, tick the 10% discount for EMBnet members, and add the text "10% discount, ISCB member" where it says "From where did you hear about Henry Stewart".


Stanford University position in Scientific Computing
The Computer Science Department of Stanford University invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position from candidates with expertise in the areas of continuous and discrete modeling, numerical analysis, or high-performance scientific computing. Candidates are expected to have an excellent background in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, and to be actively involved in the development of computational tools in relation to application areas such as (but not restricted to) biocomputation, imaging, physical simulation, data mining, and statistical learning. Higher priority will be given to the overall innovation and promise of the candidate's work than to contributions to any of these specific topics. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in a relevant field. The successful candidate will be expected to teach courses, both in scientific computing and in related subjects, at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and to build and lead a team of graduate students in Ph.D. research. The appointment will be made at the level of an Assistant Professor. The position is available immediately. Further information about the Computer Science Department can be viewed on http://www.cs.stanford.edu. A full description of the job is at http://cs.stanford.edu/Info/jobs.html#Job1


ISMB 2000 - 1ST CALL FOR PAPERS FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS The Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2000)
August 19 - August 23, 2000
San Diego, California USA
http://ismb2000.sdsc.edu Introduction The ISMB conference provides a general forum for disseminating the latest developments in bioinformatics. ISMB is a multidisciplinary conference that brings together scientists from computer science, molecular biology, mathematics and statistics. Its scope includes the development and application of advanced computational methods for biological problems. Relevant computational techniques include, but are not limited to: machine learning, pattern recognition, knowledge representation, databases, combinatorics, stochastic modeling, string and graph algorithms, linguistic methods, robotics, constraint satisfaction, and parallel computation. Biological areas of interest include molecular structure, genomics, molecular sequence analysis, evolution and phylogenetics, molecular interactions, metabolic pathways, regulatory networks, developmental control, and molecular biology generally. Emphasis is placed on the validation of methods using real data sets, on practical applications in the biological sciences, and on development of novel computational techniques. Over 800 attendees are expected. Special Emphasis ISMB 2000 will place special emphasis on knowledge discovery from the modeling and simulation of complex biological systems. This includes, but is not limited to, interpretation of large-scale gene expression data, whole genome comparative analysis, mathematical modeling of biochemical pathways, and interpretation of large macromolecular assembles using data at different resolutions.

Keynote Speakers
Gerald Edelman Neuroscience Institute
Harold Scheraga Cornell University
J. Andrew McCammon University of California, San Diego
Gene Myers Celera Genomics Corp.
[Others to be announced] Location The four-day conference and additional tutorial sessions will be held on the beautiful campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD). UCSD is located near the beach 10 miles north of the city of San Diego. The city of San Diego is 15 miles north of Mexico and 110 miles south of Los Angeles in Southern California. UCSD is part of the La Jolla mesa which includes The Scripps Research Institute, The Salk Institute and The Burnham Institute as well as many biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. UCSD is in close proximity to some fine beaches. In an effort to encourage the attendance of students and post doctoral fellows inexpensive campus housing for individuals, couples, and families will be available as well as several fine hotels adjoining the campus. Papers The conference will feature original, refereed papers, software demonstrations, posters and introductory tutorials. There will also be an exhibition of hardware and software vendors. Papers will be published by the AAAI in an archival proceeding and are indexed in the Medline database, and will be provided to participants as a bound volume at the conference. The Proceedings will appear on the Web one-year after the conference. Paper Format Papers should be a maximum of 12 pages, single-spaced and set in 12 point type, including title, abstract, figures, tables, and bibliography. The first page should give keywords, postal and electronic mailing addresses, telephone, and fax numbers. The format to use is described at http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/authorinstructions.html. PAPERS NOT CONFORMING TO THESE GUIDELINES WILL BE RETURNED WITHOUT REVIEW.

Submission information Papers should be sent electronically, in Postscript or pdf format only, to ismb00@sdsc.edu. The subject line should contain the title of the paper and the corresponding author should email the paper. Key Dates
Meeting:
Tutorial presentations: Aug 19, 2000
Paper presentations: Aug 20-23, 2000
Paper Submissions:
Papers must be received by: Feb 14, 2000
Replies to authors by: Mar 20, 2000
Revised papers must be received by: Apr 10, 2000
Open Poster Submissions:
Abstracts must be received by: May 31, 2000
Tutorial Proposals
Short (1-paragraph) proposals must be received by: Jan 15, 2000
Full (3 page) proposals must be received by: Feb 15, 2000
Replies to proposers by: Apr. 1, 2000
Draft handouts must be received by: May 1, 2000
Final handouts must be received by: Jul 01, 2000
Tutorials presented: Aug 19, 2000
Registration
Begins: Apr. 15, 2000 Ends: June 15, 2000
ISMB-00 Local Organizing Committee Sponsors To Date

Draft ISCB Privacy Policy Statement Dear ISCB members, As several of you have pointed out, the ISCB registration form collects personal information, yet we do not have a posted privacy statement. I have written a *draft* privacy statement for the society, which is included below. The purpose of circulating this statement now is to get comments from the membership -- please send your comments to president@iscb.org. Sometime in the new year, we will integrate the comments we receive, and propose a final privacy statement for approval of the board. In the mean time, you can take this draft statement as an indication of our intentions with respect to your personal data. Larry Hunter ISCB President Draft ISCB Privacy Policy We collect information about our members in order to provide membership services, and to pursue our scientific mission. We disclose individually identifiable information about you only in the following circumstances:
  1. We send your name and contact information to the publishers of the journals to which you subscribe.
  2. We will verify your membership in the Society to conference organizers or other entities who offer discounts to Society members.
  3. We send your name, address and credit card number to our bank for processing your payment.
  4. From time to time, we receive third party requests to identify members who might be appropriate for non-Society tasks related to our scientific mission, such as potential grant reviewers, editorial board members, etc. Before releasing any information about any of our members for any such purpose, we will contact each affected member and obtain explicit permission for each such release.
  5. Members of the board of directors and members of Society committees are listed on the Society web site along with their contact information; this disclosure is a requirement for serving in those capacities.

No other disclosure of any personally identifiable information to any person or entity outside of the society will be made without both the approval of the society's executive committee and the explicit permission of the member(s) involved. Within the Society, we make two main uses of personal information: we use your email address to contact you, and we create statistical profiles of our membership using aggregated non-identifiable data to monitor and report on the state of the field and the Society. We use your email address and other contact information to send out the Society newsletter and other communications from us. Occasionally, third parties approach the Society with offers they would like to communicate to our membership. We carefully screen these offers for suitability, and email those which we approve to the portion of the membership that requested to receive such messages. Members may opt in or out of receiving such messages on the registration form when becoming or renewing their membership, or at any time by sending email to admin@iscb.org. We compute and disclose aggregate information about our membership, such as its size, national composition, conferences attended, and so on. The uses of such information will always be compatible with our scientific mission.

Copyright © 1999 International Society for Computational Biology. All rights reserved.