The symposium covers all areas of bioinformatics research, ranging from comparative genomics and population genetics to structure prediction and protein-protein interaction networks. Accepted extended abstracts will be published as a volume in the Springer Verlag's Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series, while short abstracts will be published online and on CD-ROM. In addition to contributed abstracts, the technical program will include tutorials, panel discussions, and poster sessions, and will feature invited keynote talks by distinguished researchers in the field. Full versions of selected abstracts presented at the symposium will be invited to peer-reviewed special issues of IEEE/ ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and BMC Bioinformatics. The symposium provides ample opportunities for interaction between researchers with complementary expertise thus fostering new collaborations.
(ISBRA 2012) was held at the University of Texas at Dallas, from May 21st to May 23rd, 2012. The conference was a great success as reported by the participating researchers, developers, and practitioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. ISBRA 2012 drew over 90 attendees from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China (including Hong Kong), Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, and the United States. The symposium featured 42 oral presentations and 21 poster presentations based on the papers selected by the program committee from 66 full paper and 37 short paper submissions. Five distinguished scientists gave keynote talks. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its goal of bringing together scientists in various areas of bio and medical sciences and fostering collaborations among them. The travel award was used to fund 4 post-docs and 18 graduate students from 16 different universities in the United States. The travel award had a major impact on the symposium as it partially supported approximately 25% of the attendees (22 out of 92 attendees). The symposium proceedings were published by Spring Verlag and two special issues in prominent bioinformatics research journals (ACM/IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and BMC Bioinformatics) are coming out in the near future that feature extended versions of selected papers.
