CALL FOR PAPERS – SAC BIO 2010

The 25th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
22 – 26 March 2010
Sierre, Switzerland
Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology Track
http://www.nrcbioinformatics.ca/acmsac2010/

Track description and motivations

The publishing of the draft of the human genome and the recent advancements in high throughput sequencing and functional genomics technologies has ushered in a new era of rapid and exponential growth of data related to how organisms function at the molecular level. A major part of the information to support this understanding is available on large number of heterogeneous databases in both structured and unstructured formats. One challenge is to obtain information and knowledge from these databases and integrate them in a semantically consistent way, in order to be able to analyze them using novel quantitative conceptual and computational approaches smoothly connecting models and experiments. This can offer life scientists a deeper system-level understanding of fundamental biological principles. Examples of computational challenges in this new research paradigm, called systems biology, include identification of biological pathways, structure annotation of proteins, inference of biochemical networks and pathways using experimental data, information, and knowledge scattered over heterogeneous databases.

The convergence of computer science and biology is both a data- and model- driven new science that necessitates the development of mathematical/computational models and data mining algorithms, that can enable scientists and bio-engineers to analyze with predictive ability biological information that guide the development of therapeutic and biotechnology solutions.

This track is motivated by the rapidly growing importance of the informatics vision for novel levels of understanding in complex biological and biomedical systems, and will address research issues related to the whole spectrum of bioinformatics with a particular focus on integrative, inferential and translational bioinformatics.


List of topics

Papers are solicited in, but not limited to the following areas:
• Algebraic biology
• Bio imaging
• Bioinformatics for drug design & discovery
• Biological databases, warehousing and management
• Biomedical data integration, metadata & ontologies
• Biomarker identification and annotation
• Biomedical text mining
• Computational and Comparative genomics
• Data visualization and visual analytics
• Disease informatics
• Evolution and phylogenetics
• Gene expression/regulation & microarrays
• Healthcare applications
• High-performance bio-computing
• Inference of biochemical network models from experimental data
• Integrative bioinformatics
• Laboratory information management systems in biology
• Model driven analysis of biological systems
• Modeling, analysis and Inference of gene and protein networks
• Molecular modeling and simulation
• Molecular sequence analysis
• Pathways identification
• Population genetics
• Proteomics
• Protein & RNA structure and function
• Protein structure prediction and modeling
• Recognition of genes and regulatory elements
• Semantic technologies for life sciences
• Sequence analysis & alignment
• SNPs, mutations and haplotyping
• Structural bioinformatics
• Tool integration, web services and workflow systems


Papers submission

All submissions should represent original and previously unpublished works that are currently not under review in any conference or journal. Both basic and applied research papers are welcome. The author(s) name(s) and address(s) must NOT appear in the body of the submitted paper, and self-references should be in the third person. This is to facilitate blind review required by ACM. All submitted papers must include the paper identification number on the front page, above the title of the paper provided to you by the eCMS when you register your paper.

All enquiries and questions should be directed to the Track Chairs. Additional details are available at the track home page at http://www.nrcbioinformatics.ca/acmsac2010/ .


Important dates

Paper submission: September 8, 2009
Notification of paper acceptance/rejection: October 19, 2009
Camera ready: November 2, 2009


Conference Paper Publication

All papers will be fully refereed and undergo a blind review process by at least three referees. The conference proceedings will be published by ACM. Hence, all accepted papers should be submitted in ACM 2-column camera-ready format for publication in the symposium proceedings. The final version of the paper should not be more than 5 pages long. An additional 3 pages are allowed with a charge of 80USD per extra page. Final Camera-ready submissions must follow the template available at: http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2010/.



Journal Paper Publication

Expanded version of 4-5 top ranking papers will be accepted for publication in the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics (ijdmb@inderscience.com). Authors will be contacted after the presentation of these papers at the SAC Conference.



Poster Publication of Selected Papers

A set of selected papers will be accepted as poster papers by invitation only and will be published as short papers in the symposium proceedings.


Track chairs

Paola Lecca, Ph.D.
Microsoft Research Center
University of Trento, Italy.
Email: lecca@cosbi.eu

Kanagasabai Rajaraman, Ph.D.
Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore.
E-mail: kanagasa@i2r.a-star.edu.sg

Dan Tulpan, Ph.D.
Institute of Information Technology
National Research Council of Canada, Canada
E-mail: dan.tulpan@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca