ACM-SAC BIO 2010 Conference Track on Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology (BIO)

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.
The SAC 2010 BIO 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.