RECOMB 2004 Registration Now open

The RECOMB conference series will stop in San Diego for the 2004 edition of the annual event. To be held from March 27 thru 31, RECOMB, short for Research in Computational Molecular Biology, will showcase some of the most cutting edge discoveries and techniques to have recently emerged from a dynamic field of science bridging computer science and biology. Over 600 attendees from around the world are expected for the 2004 event. You can register today at recomb04.sdsc.edu/registration.html. Early registration rates expire on February 15 and all ISCB and ACM/SIGACT members enjoy additional registration discounts.

RECOMB 2004 will provide a general forum for disseminating the latest research in bioinformatics and computational biology. It is a multidisciplinary conference that brings together academic and industrial scientists from molecular biology, medicine, computer science, mathematics and statistics. University of California, San Diego’s Philip E. Bourne, will serve as conference general chair and Dan Gusfield of the University of California, Davis is the meeting’s program chair.

RECOMB was first held in 1997 to provide a forum for theoretical advances in computational biology and their applications in molecular biology and medicine. The conference descended from a heritage of formal studies in theoretical and algorithmic computational biology, and today there remains a certain focus on computational advances. However, the effective use of computational techniques to biological innovation has also become an important emphasis of the meeting.

The conference program will include 38 contributed papers from some 130 submissions selected by an international program committee through a rigorous review process that rivals the editorial process for top-rate scientific journals. Ten page extended abstracts of the contributed papers are collected in a volume published by ACM Press and available at the conference, with full versions of a selection of the papers published annually in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Biology devoted to the RECOMB Conference.

Another highlight of RECOMB is a collection of nine keynotes awarded to an international group of top researchers who are asked to inform the community about landmark advances in computational and experimental research and inject new directions into the field of computational molecular biology. Those include: Carlos Bustamante, University of California, Berkeley; Russell Doolittle, University of California, San Diego, 2004 Award Recipient: The Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Computational Biology Lecture; Andrew Fire, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 2004 Award Recipient: The Distinguished Biology Lecture; Richard Karp, University of California, Berkeley, 2004 Award Recipient: Fred Howes Distinguished Service Award; William McGinnis, University of California, San Diego; Deborah Nickerson, University of Washington; Martin Nowak, Harvard University; Christine Orengo, University College London; Elizabeth Winzeler, Scripps Research Institute.

RECOMB 2004 is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (ACM-SIGACT) and will be organized by University of California San Diego, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the International Society for Computational Biology. The conference will be held at the Westin Hotel Horton Plaza, San Diego. For full conference information, including the list of accepted papers, please visit recomb04.sdsc.edu/.