We are planning a Workshop, entitled "Identifying Features in Biological Sequences", to be held May 30 to June 19 at the Aspen Center for Physics (ACP). The participants will be from fields of math and statistics, computer science and molecular biology. All will be interested in problems of extracting bimlogical information from sequences, but with diverse enough approaches that many of them would not otherwise interact with each other. The total number of participants will be about 25, with a mixture of senior and junior researchers. The format of the Workshop is specifically designed to foster collaborations and other intensive interactions. Tutorials will be given by experts in particular fields to enlighten the others in the current ideas and methods in that field. There will also be talks by participants about their current research and the questions they are currently pursuing. Most importantly for this Workshop, there will be ample unscheduled time to foster individual and small group interactions. This will be facilitated by a small local area network of workstations, with access to the Internet available. This allows participants to obtain data and programs from their home (or other) institutions and to compare methods on similar data, and on various different data sets. It allows the hands-on development of modified approaches and even entirely new programs. Several examples exist from previous meetings where new methods have been explored directly due to the Workshop.
