ISCB Africa ASBCB 2013 - Call for Papers and Posters

Dear ISCB and ASBCB Members and Colleagues,

Submissions for the ISCB Africa ASBCB 2013 Conference on Bioinformatics are now being accepted. This is the third joint meeting of ISCB and ASBCB, and takes place from March 13th -15th in Tunis, Tunisia. The meeting will include topics of general interest in bioinformatics, with a special focus on the bioinformatics of African pathogens, vectors, and human genetics. We especially welcome abstracts on the bioinformatics of diseases relevant to Africa, and with the new Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) initiative the genetics focus is particularly relevant and timely.

Submissions of papers are due by October 24th, and poster abstracts are due by December 12th. Please visit the conference submission guidelines and follow the links to submit your paper or poster today.

Pre-conference optional events are planned for March 11th and 12th, including a variety of Training Workshops and Tutorials such as EBI Roadshow training, EMBnet eBioKit workshops, LIRMM and EMBL instructor-led introduction to Phylogeny, and a full day session on deep sequencing. For more details on these events please check the conference website frequently to watch for updates as they become available.

A limited number of travel fellowships will be made available to students from African research institutions. Additionally, a grant proposal has been submitted to a U.S. agency that, if awarded, would help fund American students to attend. Information on eligibility and application procedures will be posted to the conference website as soon as full details are known. Early registration will be offered at discounted prices, and all ISCB and ASBCB members will enjoy significant savings.

Commit to your participation now - submit your paper or poster (or both!) today.

Yours sincerely,

Alia Benkahla
ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference Chair

Dan Masiga
ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference Program Committee Chair

RECOMB Satellite Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges

November 12-15, 2012

Hotel Sofitel San Francisco Bay

Redwood City, CA

Please join us for the fifth annual RECOMB Satellite Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges. Now an official conference of the International Society for Computational Biology, this event is one of the premier annual meetings for computational and experimental scientists in the areas of regulatory genomics and systems biology.

Register now to take advantage of early registration discounts. ISCB members are entitled to special member rates for registration.

Over four days, the meeting will feature 15 keynote talks, additional lectures, poster sessions, and discussion of the results of this year's Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods (DREAM), a project designed to identify best practices for predicting the structure of biological networks. Best performers from this year's DREAM challenges will have an opportunity to present their methods.

Keynote speakers include:

• DREAM
  • Michael Elowitz (Caltech), Stephen Friend (Sage Bionetworks)
    
• Systems Biology
  • Markus Covert (Stanford), Dean Felsher (Stanford), Ernest Fraenkel (MIT), Joe Gray (Oregon Health & Science University), Joseph Nadeau (Institute for Systems Biology), Jonathan Weissman (UCSF)
    
• Regulatory Genomics
  • Job Dekker (University of Massachusetts Medical School), Angela DePace (Harvard), Joe Ecker (Salk Institute for Biological Studies), Yoav Gilad (University of Chicago), Len Pennacchio (Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute), Saurabh Sinha (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

For more information about the conference, please visit the conference website.

We look forward to seeing you in the Bay Area!

Conference Chairs,

Andrea Califano - Columbia University
Manolis Kellis - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sylvia Plevritis - Stanford University
Gustavo Stolovitzky - IBM

Reminder Call for Highlights Papers and Posters
Conference Registration Now Open!

ISCB-Asia/SCCG 2012, co-hosted by ISCB and BGI, will be held in Shenzhen, China from December 17-19. Confirmed keynote speakers include Gunnar von Heijne, Philip Greene, Piero Carninci, Takashi Ito, Eric Xing and Zhiping Weng. They will be joined by several prominent invited speakers in special sessions including: computational tools for NGS, cancer informatics, and cloud and work flows for reproducible biology. ISCB is known for hosting a variety of international meetings including ISMB, while BGI of Shenzhen is one of the world's largest sequencing centersin a booming city with easy access from adjacent Hong Kong and a pleasant climate during December.

Call for Highlights: We invite the submission of talks describing research published as full journal papers within the last 12 months (between August 31, 2011 and September 30, 2012) on topics including, but not limited to: computational tools for NGS, cancer genome informatics, cloud and work flows for reproducible bioinformatics, protein bioinformatics, metagenomics, RNA informatics, machine learning, and open problems in computational biology. Submissions should include a 250-word Scientific Justification (abstract-like argument) that explains how the work of the submitted paper(s) is impacting the field.Publications that are "in press" and already linked on the journal web site by September 30, 2012 are welcome. A group of experts will select the papers to be presented at the meeting considering the impact of the work on the field, the likelihood that the work will make a good presentation, and the relevance to biomedicine and computational biology. Accepted presenters to the Highlights Track are required to make the presentation themselves (rather than assign a co-author to make the presentation).

• Submit your Highlights Paper today.
  • Note the following important dates:
    • Papers published from Aug 31, 2011 to Sep 30, 2012 can be considered for a Highlights Paper submission.
    • Submission deadline: Sep 30, 2012
    • Notification Date: Oct 29, 2012

Call for Posters: Poster abstracts in the same topic areas are also invited. Please submit your poster directly to the ISCB-Asia/SCCG 2012 Posters submission site by the submission deadline of October 31, 2012.

Register Today: Conference registration is now open! ISCB members and BGI staff are eligible for special discounts. All accepted paper and poster presenters must register and pay to attend the conference. If you are not a current ISCB member, consider joining today for instant benefits including discounted registration to this conference.

We look forward to receiving your submissions and welcoming you to Shenzhen in December,

Victor Jin, The Ohio State University - Program Committee Chair

Paul Horton, AIST Japan - Conference Chair and Program Committee Co-Chair

ISCB Wikipedia Competition

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

During the ISMB conference in July we announced that ISCB would be opening an international competition to improve the coverage on Wikipedia of any aspect of computational biology. A key component of the ISCB's mission to further the scientific understanding of living systems through computation is to communicate this knowledge to the public at large. Wikipedia has become an important way to communicate all types of science to the public. The ISCB aims to further its mission by increasing the quality of Wikipedia articles about computational biology, and by improving accessibility to this information via Wikipedia. The competition is open to students and trainees at any level either as individuals or as groups.

We are now pleased to announce that the competition is officially open as of the 9th of September 2012, coinciding with the start of the ECCB conference, and will finish four months later on the 10th of January 2013.

The prize for the best article will be an award of $500 (US) provided by the ISCB and a year's membership to the ISCB. A second prize will be $200 and a year's membership to the ISCB.

For full details visit the WikiProject Computational Biology/ISCB Competition Announcement. There you will find information on how to enter the competition, how to create and edit Wikipedia articles if not already trained in doing so, the rules and regulations of the competition, and a special note for educators and course coordinators.

Please help spread the word - the more participants the higher the quality will be of Wikipedia articles about computational biology for all. Feel free to forward this mail, or share the URL of the competition announcement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computational_Biology/ISCB_competition_announcement).

Sincerely,

The ISCB Wikipedia Competition Judging Panel

Burkhard Rost
Alex Bateman
Predrag Radivojac
Janet Kelso
Thomas Abeel
Geoff Macintyre
Darren Logan
Daniel Mietchener Center
Ohio University (Russ College; Vice President Research; College of Arts and Science)
Ohio University Edison Biotechnology Institute
Procter & Gamble
Springer
The Ohio State University
University of Akron
University of Cincinnati Children's Hospital
University of Michigan - DCM&B and OVPR
University of Michigan - Biomedical Research Core Facilities
University of Michigan - Metabolomics Core
University of Pittsburgh
Wittenberg University
Wright State University

ISCB Announcements

Sept 04: The Roots of Bioinformatics in ISMB published in August issue of PLoS Computational Biology – Read all about it!

Last Call for Submissions: RECOMB Satellite Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

The deadline for submissions for the 5th annual joint RECOMB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges, is just two weeks away. We invite you to participate by submitting a paper or abstract.

For more information, visit: http://recomb-2012.c2b2.columbia.edu/.

The 5th annual joint RECOMB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges is one of the premier annual meetings for computational and experimental scientists in the fields of regulatory genomics and systems biology, and is now an official conference of the International Society for Computational Biology. The meeting will be held at the Hotel Sofitel San Francisco Bay on November 12-15, 2012.

All submissions of full-length papers will be considered for publication in Genome Research and the Journal of Computational Biology. Accepted papers will be published in conjunction with the conference and authors of selected papers will present their work at the meeting. Our program committee will review all submitted papers in collaboration with the journal editors and the conference chairs.

We are also accepting submissions of abstracts, including both original unpublished work and work that has been published or accepted for publication by a high-impact journal between January 1 and November 1, 2012. Unpublished work will be considered for either an oral or a poster presentation. Work already accepted for publication will be considered for an oral presentation only.

***The deadline for all submissions is September 7, 2012 ***

This conference is designed to present the latest findings about regulatory and systems genomics, foster discussion about current research directions, and establish new collaborations that will advance the development of a systems-level understanding of gene regulation. Areas of interest for papers, abstracts, and nominations include:

• Modeling and recognition of regulatory motifs and modules
  
• Chromatin state establishment, maintenance, and role in development
• Post-transcriptional regulation and small regulatory RNAs
• Regulatory networks, metabolic networks, proteomic networks
• Cellular signatures of biological responses and disease states
• Phosphorylation, metabolic fluxes, systematic phenotyping
• Mathematical modeling and simulation of biological systems
• Methods for systematic validation of high-throughput biological predictions
• Approaches for aggregation of results arising from different methodologies

We are also still accepting submissions for participation in the DREAM Challenges, designed to identify the best practices for predicting the structure of biological networks. Lastly, we are also still inviting nominations for RegGen-TopTen 2011, our list of the most influential papers of 2011 in the fields of Regulatory and Systems Genomics, in conjunction with the ISMB Special Interest Group on Regulatory Genomics (RegGen SIG). See our website above for more information.

We are looking forward to very exciting program. Our invited speakers include Howard Chang, Job Dekker, Angela DePace, Joe Ecker, Yoav Gilad, Len Pennacchio, Saurabh Sinha, Stephen Friend, Jonathan Weissman, Dean Felsher, Michael Elowitz, Joe Nadeau, Markus Covert, Joe Gray, and Ernest Fraenkel.

Registration is also now open and early registration rates will expire October 12th. We hope that you will participate and look forward to seeing you in San Francisco this November!

Best regards,

Andrea Califano, Manolis Kellis, Sylvia Plevritis, and Gustavo Stolovitzky

Conference Chairs

Submission Deadline Approaching: RECOMB Satellite Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

The deadline for submissions for the 5th annual joint RECOMB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges, is just two weeks away. We invite you to participate by submitting a paper or abstract.

For more information, visit: http://recomb-2012.c2b2.columbia.edu/.

The 5th annual joint RECOMB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges is one of the premier annual meetings for computational and experimental scientists in the fields of regulatory genomics and systems biology, and is now an official conference of the International Society for Computational Biology. The meeting will be held at the Hotel Sofitel San Francisco Bay on November 12-15, 2012.

All submissions of full-length papers will be considered for publication in Genome Research and the Journal of Computational Biology. Accepted papers will be published in conjunction with the conference and authors of selected papers will present their work at the meeting. Our program committee will review all submitted papers in collaboration with the journal editors and the conference chairs.

We are also accepting submissions of abstracts, including both original unpublished work and work that has been published or accepted for publication by a high-impact journal between January 1 and November 1, 2012. Unpublished work will be considered for either an oral or a poster presentation. Work already accepted for publication will be considered for an oral presentation only.

***The deadline for all submissions is September 7, 2012 ***

This conference is designed to present the latest findings about regulatory and systems genomics, foster discussion about current research directions, and establish new collaborations that will advance the development of a systems-level understanding of gene regulation. Areas of interest for papers, abstracts, and nominations include:

• Modeling and recognition of regulatory motifs and modules
  
• Chromatin state establishment, maintenance, and role in development
• Post-transcriptional regulation and small regulatory RNAs
• Regulatory networks, metabolic networks, proteomic networks
• Cellular signatures of biological responses and disease states
• Phosphorylation, metabolic fluxes, systematic phenotyping
• Mathematical modeling and simulation of biological systems
• Methods for systematic validation of high-throughput biological predictions
• Approaches for aggregation of results arising from different methodologies

We are also still accepting submissions for participation in the DREAM Challenges, designed to identify the best practices for predicting the structure of biological networks. Lastly, we are also still inviting nominations for RegGen-TopTen 2011, our list of the most influential papers of 2011 in the fields of Regulatory and Systems Genomics, in conjunction with the ISMB Special Interest Group on Regulatory Genomics (RegGen SIG). See our website above for more information.

We are looking forward to very exciting program. Our invited speakers include Howard Chang, Job Dekker, Angela DePace, Joe Ecker, Yoav Gilad, Len Pennacchio, Saurabh Sinha, Stephen Friend, Jonathan Weissman, Dean Felsher, Michael Elowitz, Joe Nadeau, Markus Covert, Joe Gray, and Ernest Fraenkel.

We hope that you will participate and look forward to seeing you in San Francisco this November!

Best regards,

Andrea Califano, Manolis Kellis, Sylvia Plevritis, and Gustavo Stolovitzky

Conference Chairs

Call for Highlights Papers and Posters:  ISCB-Asia/SCCG 2012

ISCB-Asia/SCCG 2012, co-hosted by ISCB and BGI, will be held in Shenzhen, China from December 17-19. Confirmed keynote speakers include Gunnar von Heijne, Philip Greene, Piero Carninci, Takashi Ito, Eric Xing and Zhiping Weng. They will be joined by several prominent invited speakers in special sessions including: computational tools for NGS, cancer informatics, and cloud and work flows for reproducible biology. ISCB is known for hosting a variety of international meetings including ISMB, while BGI of Shenzhen is one of the world's largest sequencing centers. Shenzhen is a booming city with easy access from adjacent Hong Kong and a pleasant climate during December.

Call for Highlights: We invite the submission of talks describing research published as full journal papers between August 31, 2011 and September 30, 2012 of topics including, but not limited to: computational tools for NGS, cancer genome informatics, cloud and work flows for reproducible bioinformatics, protein bioinformatics, metagenomics, RNA informatics, machine learning, and open problems in computational biology. Publications that are "in press" and already linked on the journal web site by September 30, 2012 are welcome. A group of experts will select the papers to be presented at the meeting considering the impact of the work on the field, the likelihood that the work will make a good presentation, and the relevance to biomedicine and computational biology. Accepted presenters to the Highlights Track are required to make the presentation themselves (rather than assign a co-author to make the presentation), and must register and pay to attend the conference.

Submissions should include a 250-word Scientific Justification (abstract-like argument) that explains how the work of the submitted paper(s) is impacting the field.

Please note the following dates:

• Papers published from Aug 31, 2011 to Sep 30, 2012 considered.
• Submission deadline: Sep 30, 2012
• Notification Date: Oct 29, 2012

Please submit your Highlights papers directly to the ISCB submission site at www.iscb.org/submissions/index.php?id=128

Call for Posters: Poster abstracts in the same topic areas are also invited. Please submit your poster directly to the ISCB submission site at www.iscb.org/submissions/index.php?id=129 by the submission deadline of October 31, 2012. Accepted poster presenters must register and pay to attend the conference.

We look forward to receiving your submissions,

Victor Jin, The Ohio State University - Program Committee Chair

Paul Horton, AIST Japan - Conference Chair and Program Committee Co-Chair

CALL FOR PAPERS, ABSTRACTS, and NOMINATIONS - RECOMB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges

Dear colleague,

We are still accepting submissions of papers and abstracts for the 5th annual joint RECOMB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges, which is now an official conference of the International Society for Computational Biology, and one of the premier annual meetings for computational and experimental scientists in the fields of regulatory genomics and systems biology. The meeting will be held at the Hotel Sofitel San Francisco Bay on November 12-15, 2012.

*** The deadline for all submissions is September 7, 2012. ***

Submission information is available at http://recomb-2012.c2b2.columbia.edu/.

This conference is designed to present the latest findings about regulatory and systems genomics, foster discussion about current research directions, and establish new collaborations that will advance the development of a systems-level understanding of gene regulation.

Invited speakers include: Howard Chang, Job Dekker, Angela DePace, Joe Ecker, Yoav Gilad, Len Pennacchio, Saurabh Sinha, Stephen Friend, Jonathan Weissman, Dean Felsher, Michael Elowitz, Joe Nadeau, Markus Covert, Joe Gray, and Ernest Fraenkel.

We are now accepting submissions of full-length papers to be considered for publication in Genome Research and the Journal of Computational Biology. Accepted papers will be published in conjunction with the conference and authors of selected papers will be invited to present their work at the meeting. Our program committee will review all submitted papers in collaboration with the journal editors and the conference chairs.

We are also accepting submissions of abstracts, including both original unpublished work and work that has been published or accepted for publication by a high-impact journal between January 1 and November 1, 2012. Unpublished work will be considered for either an oral or a poster presentation. Work already accepted for publication will be considered for an oral presentation only.

Lastly, we are also excited to announce that we invite nominations for RegGen-TopTen 2011, our list of the most influential papers of 2011 in the fields of Regulatory and Systems Genomics, in conjunction with the ISMB Special Interest Group on Regulatory Genomics (RegGen SIG). First and last authors of these papers will be honored at the meeting and highlighted online. All nominations will be evaluated by leaders in the field, including our past keynote speakers.

Areas of interest for papers, abstracts, and nominations include:

• Modeling and recognition of regulatory motifs and modules
• Chromatin state establishment, maintenance, and role in development
• Post-transcriptional regulation and small regulatory RNAs
• Regulatory networks, metabolic networks, proteomic networks
• Cellular signatures of biological responses and disease states
• Phosphorylation, metabolic fluxes, systematic phenotyping
• Mathematical modeling and simulation of biological systems
• Methods for systematic validation of high-throughput biological predictions
• Approaches for aggregation of results arising from different methodologies

We are also still accepting submissions for participation in the DREAM Challenges, designed to identify the best practices for predicting the structure of biological networks.

We hope that you will participate and look forward to seeing you in San Francisco this November!

Best regards,
Andrea Califano, Manolis Kellis, Sylvia Plevritis, and Gustavo Stolovitzky
Conference Chairs

ROCKY CALL FOR ABSTRACTS AND EARLY REGISTRATION ARE NOW OPEN

December 6 - 8 , 2012, Snowmass/Aspen, Colorado, USA

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

Please join us for the 10th Annual Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference! The Rocky conference series has grown from a small regional event into an international program with a spotlight on regional development in the computational biosciences. Invited and accepted presenters represent a broad spectrum of universities, industrial enterprises, government laboratories, and medical libraries from around the world. The meeting is a chance to get to know your colleagues near and far, seek collaborative opportunities, and find synergies that can drive our field forward.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: The Rocky 2012 Conference (www.iscb.org/rocky2012) provides opportunities for short flash presentations (10 minute talks) on current projects from as many attendees as possible. Original presentations (including significant works-in-progress) are solicited in all areas that involve the application of advanced computational methods to significant problems in biology or medicine.

Submitters are given the option to apply for a 10-minute "flash" oral presentation, a poster presentation, or both. We will attempt to accommodate all requests from authors accepted for presentation. The submission form is located here: www.iscb.org/rocky2012-program/rocky2012-call-for-presentations.

Submission Form Key Dates:

• Submission Deadline: October 4, 2012
• Acceptance Notification: November 2, 2012

EARLY REGISTRATION IS OPEN: Take advantage of early registration rates by visiting: www.iscb.org/rocky2012-register. Please note that accepted presenters must register as a conference attendee by November 6 in order to give a presentation at Rocky 2012.

We look forward to your participation! Please feel free to share this invitation with your colleagues and collaborators - the Rocky conference offers a special Academic Retreat package for groups attending from the same lab or school, including a free student registration.

We hope to see you there!

The Rocky 2012 Conference Organizing Team