The Fourth International Workshop on Computational Network Biology: Modeling, Analysis, and Control (CNB-MAC 2017) will be held in Boston, MA, August 20, 2017. The workshop will be organized in conjunction with the 8th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM-BCB 2017). CNB-MAC 2017 is a continuation of the first, second and third CNB-MAC workshops in 2014, 2015 and 2016. The continuing partnership with ACM-BCB will enhance the visibility of the workshop and attract researchers from various disciplines across engineering, computer science, statistics, biology, and medicine.
CNB-MAC 2017 aims to provide an international scientific forum for presenting recent advances in computational network biology and boost the awareness of the importance of rigorous mathematical modeling in transforming big biomedical data into reproducible and meaningful scientific knowledge. One of the missions of CNB-MAC that is of foremost importance is to foster next-generation scientists in the emerging field of computational network biology. The workshop aims to offer keynote, tutorial, and research talks to provide future research directions for participating graduate students and post-doctoral researchers, especially women and minorities. CNB-MAC 2017 will provide travel awards to encourage graduate students to participate in the workshop and present their latest research findings. Specifically, the workshop plans to allocate a minimum of 20-30% of the awards to female and minority students to encourage their participation.
Next-generation high-throughput profiling technologies have enabled more systematic and comprehensive studies of living systems. Network models play crucial roles in understanding the complex interactions that govern biological systems, and their interactions with the external environment. The main emphasis of CNB-MAC 2017 will be on rigorous mathematical models and efficient computational approaches for studying biological networks, integrative analysis of large-scale OMICS data, developing mathematical models for the investigation of human-microbiome-environment interactions, and other topics relevant to computational network biology. Complementary to the focus of ACM-BCB 2017 on informatics tools and learning algorithms for big biomedical data, CNB-MAC's main focus is on computational network biology that involves modeling, analysis, and control of biological systems under different conditions, and system-oriented analysis of large-scale OMICS data with the goal of providing a dynamic international scientific forum for presenting the latest advances in the field.
