ICDM 2010 Workshop on Biological Data Mining and its Applications in Healthcare (http://www1.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/~xlli/BioDM.html) will be held Vancouver, Canada, December 10, 2011.
1. Introduction

Biologists are stepping up their efforts in understanding the biological processes that underlie disease pathways in the clinical contexts. This has resulted in a flood of biological and clinical data from genomic and protein sequences, DNA microarrays, protein interactions, to disease pathways, biomedical images, and electronic health records. We are in a scenario where our capability to generate biomedical data has greatly surpassed our abilities to mine and analyze the data.

To exploit these data for discovering new knowledge that can be translated into clinical applications, there are fundamental data analysis difficulties that have to be overcome. Practical issues such as handling noisy and incomplete data (e.g. protein interactions have high false positive and false negative rates), processing compute-intensive tasks (e.g. large scale graph mining), and integrating various data sources (e.g. linking genomic data, proteomics data with clinical databases) are new challenges faced by biologists in the post-genome era.

Data mining has been designed to handle such challenging data analysis problems. We can therefore expect data mining to play an increasingly crucial role in revolutionizing biological research. Data mining will be the next technical innovation employed by biologists to enable them to make meaningful observations and discoveries from a wide array of heterogeneous data from molecular biology to pharmaceutical and clinical domains.

As data mining is poised to become integrated into the next-generation pipeline of biomedical discovery process, there are unprecedented opportunities for data mining researchers from the computer science domain to come together to contribute to this meaningful scientific pursuit with the biologists and clinical scientists. The mission of this workshop is therefore to disseminate the research results and best practices of data mining approaches to the cross-disciplinary researchers and practitioners from both the data mining disciplines and the life sciences domains. We encourage submission of papers using data mining techniques to address the challenging issues in various biological data analysis. In particular, we especially welcome the submissions reporting data mining techniques in healthcare related applications that integrate the use of biological data in a clinical context for translational research.

The topics of the workshop include but are not limited to:

* Biological and medical data collection, cleansing, and integration

* Biological and medical data visualization

* Bioimage analysis

* Data pre-processing to handle noisy, missing biological and medical data

* Knowledge representation and annotation of biological and medical data

* Machine learning algorithms for biological and healthcare applications

* Disease bioinformatics

* Computational methods for drug discovery

* Biological markers detection

* Pharmacogenomics data mining

* Analysis of complex disorders

* Integration of biological and clinical data for translational research

* Bioinformatics databases and resources

* Text mining algorithms for biological and healthcare applications

* Biological network analysis (protein interaction network, metabolic network, transcription factor network, signalling network, etc.)

* Pattern analysis in computational genetics, genomics and proteomics

* Semantic web and knowledge acquisition in biology and healthcare

* Electronic health records and biomedical repositories

2. Important Dates

July 23, 2011: Due date for paper submission

September 20, 2011: Notification of paper acceptance

October 11, 2011: Camera-ready versions of accepted papers

December 10, 2011: Workshop

3. Submissions

Paper submissions are limited to a maximum of 10 pages in the IEEE 2-column format, which is the same as the camera-ready format (see the IEEE Computer Society Press Proceedings Author Guidelines). All papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee based on technical quality, relevance to data mining, originality, significance, and clarity. A double blind reviewing process will be adopted. Authors should therefore avoid using identifying information in the text of the paper. All papers should be submitted through the ICDM Workshop Submission Site.

All accepted workshop papers will be published in a separate ICDM workshop proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. In addition, authors with accepted papers to the workshop will have the opportunity to be invited to publish their extended versions in the following two venues: a) as book chapters in an edited book which will be published by World Scientific and b) as journal papers in International Journal of Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics (IJKDB).

4. PC members (confirmed so far)

Zhang Aidong, State University of New York at Buffalo (UB), USA

Tatsuya Akutsu, Kyoto University, Japan

Zeyar Aung, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, UAE

Vladimir Bajic, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Jin Chen, Michigan State University, USA

Phoebe Chen, La Trobe University, Australia

Honnian Chua, Harvard University, USA

Juan Cui, University of Georgia, USA

Yang Dai, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Xin Gao, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Xiaoxu Han, Eastern Michigan University, USA

David Hansen, Australian e-Health Research Centre, Australia

Wen-Lian Hsu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Jimmy Huang, York University, Canada

Raphael Isokpehi, Jackson State University, USA

Dawei Li, Yale University, USA

Haiquan Li, University of Chicago, USA

Igor Jurisica, University of Toronto, Canada

Daisuke Kihara, Purdue University, USA

Shonali Krishnaswamy, Monash University, Australia

Chee Keong Kwoh, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Hiroshi Mamitsuka, Kyoto University, Japan

Laxmi Parida, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA

George Perry, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA

Mark A. Ragan, The University of Queensland, Australia

Raul Rabadan, Columbia University, USA

Jianhua Ruan, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA

Indra Neil Sarkar, University of Vermont, USA

Ambuj K Singh, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA

Narayanaswamy Srinivasan, Indian Institute of Science, India

Zeeshan Syed, University of Michigan, USA

Vincent S. Tseng, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Alfonso Valencia, Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, Spain

Hong Yan, City University of Hong Kong, China

Philip S. Yu, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Erliang Zeng, University of Notre Dame, USA

Xiaoling Zhang, Boston University, Boston, MA

Marketa Zvelebil, Breaktrhough Breast Cancer Research - ICR, UK


We look forward to your submissions. In addition, we will greatly appreciate it if you can distribute the Call for Papers to your colleagues, students and other community members and encourage them to contribute to the workshop. Thank you!

Kind Regards,

Workshop Co-Chairs

Xiao-Li Li, See-Kiong Ng and Jason T. L. Wang