Introduction

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.

Conference Track 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 visualisation 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

SAC 2010

For the past twenty-four years, the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing has been a primary gathering forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, and application developers from around the world. SAC 2010 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP), and is hosted by University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland (HES-SO) and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

Links to future BIO tracks

Important Dates

Updates

Paper acceptance rate: 26%