The BioInformatics and Bio-Modeling (BIBM) conference focuses on leading edge questions in the field. The conference agenda is a varied program with topic paper areas, tutorial programs, and special interest group meetings that align with recent funding trends within the ABI program. In addition to research findings, the program also incorporates hands-on workshops of the newest informatics tools to be developed. The conference provides an interactive forum in which researchers can share ideas, learn new techniques, and forge professional relationships with other colleagues.
A panel on Bioinformatics Training and Education at the conference will help to share resources and lessons learned in bioinformatics training and workforce development. The panel will feature representatives from academics, industry and government to discuss different career paths. The conference program also includes mentoring activities. The organizers will invite 20-30 (20 funded by this award) students and postdoctoral researchers to attend the conference, with a well-articulated diversity recruitment plan that targets gender, minority, and disability participation.
The goal of this project is to promote multidisciplinary research and education in Bioinformatics and Biomedicine and support the participation of students and early career researchers to broaden its scientific impact. The major activity supported by this grant is the Sixth Annual IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM-2012) held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, on October 4-7, 2012. The Conference provided an open and interactive forum to promote interdisciplinary research and education in Bioinformatics and Biomedicine, catalyzing the cross fertilization of ideas and bridging our knowledge gaps. The scientific program highlights five themes to provide breadth, depth, and synergy for research collaboration: (i) genomics and molecular structure, function, and evolution; (ii) computational systems biology; (iii) medical informatics and translational bioinformatics; (iv) cross-cutting computational methods and bioinformatics infrastructures, and (v) healthcare informatics. The scientific quality of BIBM-2012 is evidenced by contributed talks at a highly competitive acceptance rate, three keynote speeches and several invited talks given by preeminent scientists, as well as the publication of conference and workshop proceedings and special issue publications in well-known scientific journals. The Conference received a total of 299 research paper submissions from 1015 authors/co-authors from 44 countries. The 305 Program Committee members from 29 countries accepted 121 papers, of which 58 (19.4%) were regular research papers and 63 (21.1%) were short papers. The Conference also featured a dozen workshops and three tutorials on special topics of interest, as well as poster sessions for accepted short papers and other submitted posters on topics relevant to bioinformatics and biomedicine. The Conference attracted more than 300 attendees. To broaden the reach of the scientific work presented at the conference, accepted research papers have been published in the IEEE Conference Proceedings (BIBM), while workshop papers and poster abstracts have been published in the Workshop Proceedings (BIBMW). In addition, special issues are being prepared for peer-reviewed publication in these scientific journals: IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, IEEE Transactions on System, Men and Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience, International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Genomics, BMC Proteomics Science, Proteomics, Journal of Network Modeling and Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics. The BIBM-2012 provided major training, development and mentoring opportunities. These include participation in the meeting organization, mentoring activities in the conference program, as well as special awards and registration discount for students and early-career researchers. More than 300 researchers, including many young investigators, participated in the meeting organization, serving on the Program Committee and the Organizing Committees for workshops, tutorials and posters. The Travel Awards provided crucial funding needed to support the participation of graduate students and early career researchers, while the Best Paper/Poster Awards promoted the scientific excellence of young researchers in the field of bioinformatics and biomedicine. A total of 33 students and post-docs were selected as the recipients of the Travel Awards to participate in the conference, including many from under-represented groups and minority-serving or EPSCoR institutions, as a training opportunity for the next generation of scientists and engineers, thereby, broadening the scientific impact of this international conference.
