This award provides partial travel support for students and junior researchers from the US institutions to attend the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference, the annual meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), which is being held jointly in 2007 with the annual European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) in Vienna, Austria, July 21-25, 2007. The award will also provide partial support to bring the most distinguished keynote speakers from the US to address the delegates.
The core of ISCB''''s mission statement is to advance the scientific understanding of living systems through computation. The ISMB conference has provided an annual forum for disseminating the latest developments in bioinformatics since 1993, thus serving as a key vehicle for achievement of the Society''''s mission. Past ISMB conferences have drawn as many as 2136 attendees from 35+ countries. Since 2000 the conference location has been moved between North America, Europe, and non- North American/non-European sites to foster international exchange and collaboration. As a multidisciplinary conference rich in diversity, ISMB brings together students, researchers, faculty, and staff, all of whom share a focus on computer science, molecular biology, biology, mathematics and/or statistics. ISMB focuses on research centered on actual biological problems rather than simply theoretical calculations, and attendees effectively discuss and distribute the latest developments in intelligent systems for molecular biology. Intelligent systems include any software which goes beyond straightforward, closed-form algorithms or standard database technologies, and encompasses those that view data in a symbolic fashion, learn from examples, consolidate multiple levels of abstraction, or synthesize results to be cognitively tractable to a human, including the development and application of advanced computational methods for biological problems. Relevant computational techniques presented at the conference include machine learning, pattern recognition, knowledge representation, databases, combinatorics, stochastic modeling, string and graph algorithms, linguistic methods, robotics, constraint satisfaction, and parallel computation. Biological areas presented at the conference include molecular structure, genomics, molecular sequence analysis, evolution and phylogenetics, molecular interactions, metabolic pathways, regulatory networks, developmental control, molecular biology generally and human health. The scientific program for ISMB/ECCB 2007 comprises research papers reviewed by at least two members of the program committee, and approved by a topic Area Chair, insuring the highest quality of work is presented and subsequently published as an issue of the journal Bioinformatics. New for 2007 is the addition of tracks dedicated to recently published work, special sessions on focused research areas, and an industry track to showcase achievements and future directions within the commercial community. Additionally, late breaking research is supported through posters and peer reviewed abstracts are selected for oral presentation. Meetings of special interest groups, a student organized symposium, tutorials, software demos and a vendor exhibition fill out the schedule.
