[BBC] MLSB08 call for posters and registration

[Pierre Geurts]

[apologies for multiple postings]

Dear Colleagues,

Please find below the call for posters for MLSB08. The deadline for  
poster submission is August 20.

The list of invited speakers is now complete:

Yoav Freund, Computer Science and Engineering, UCSD
Lukas Käll, Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington
Pamela A. Silver, Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School
Lodewyk Wessels, Bioinformatics and Statistics group, Netherlands  
Cancer Institute, Amsterdam

The full workshop program will be available soon.
http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/services/stochastic/mlsb08/program.html

Registration and accomodation booking is now open on the workshop  
website.
http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/services/stochastic/mlsb08/registration.html

The early-registration deadline is August 11. Because of the high  
hotel occupancy in Brussels, we strongly advise early hotel  
reservation. Accommodation via the workshop website can only be  
guaranteed up to August 14, 2008.

Best regards,

Louis Wehenkel, Florence d'Alché-Buc, Yves Moreau, Pierre Geurts



********************** Call for Posters ****************************

2nd International Workshop on Machine Learning in Systems Biology
            13-14 September 2008, Brussels, Belgium

********************************************************************

     http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/services/stochastic/mlsb08


MOTIVATION


Molecular biology and also all the biomedical sciences are undergoing
a true revolution as a result of the emergence and growing impact of a
series of new disciplines/tools sharing the "-omics" suffix in
theirname.  These include in particular genomics, transcriptomics,
proteomics and metabolomics devoted respectively to the examination of
the entire systems of genes, transcripts, proteins and metabolites
present in a given cell or tissue type.

The availability of these new, highly effective tools for biological
exploration is dramatically changing the way one performs research in
at least two respects.  First of all, the amount of available
experimental data is not at all a limiting factor any more; on the
contrary, there is a plethora of it.  The challenge has shifted
towards identifying the relevant pieces of information given the
question, and how to make sense out of it (a "data mining"
issue). Secondly, rather than to focus on components in isolation, we
can now try to understand how biological systems behave as the result
of the integration and interaction between the individual components
that one can now monitor simultaneously (so called "systems biology").

Taking advantage of this wealth of "genomic" information has become
a conditio sine qua non for whoever ambitions to remain competitive in
molecular biology and more generally in biomedical sciences. Machine
learning naturally appears as one of the main drivers of progress in
this context, where most of the targets of interest deal with complex
structured objects: sequences, 2D and 3D structures or interaction
networks. At the same time bioinformatics and systems biology have
already induced significant new developments of general interest in
machine learning, for example in the context of learning with
structured data, graph inference, semi-supervised learning, system
identification, and novel combinations of optimization and learning
algorithms.


OBJECTIVE


The aim of this workshop is to contribute to the cross-fertilization
between the research in machine learning methods and their
applications to complex biological and medical questions by bringing
together method developers and experimentalists. We encourage
submissions bringing forward methods for discovering complex
structures (e.g. interaction networks, molecule structures) and
methods supporting genome-wide data analysis.

A non-exhaustive list of topics suitable for this workshop:

Methods

Machine Learning Algorithms
Bayesian Methods
Data integration/fusion
Feature/subspace selection
Clustering
Biclustering/association rules
Kernel Methods
Probabilistic Inference
Structured output prediction
Systems identification
Graph inference, completion, smoothing
Semi-supervised learning

Applications

Sequence Annotation
Gene Expression and post-transcriptional regulation
Inference of gene regulation networks
Gene Prediction and whole genome association studies
Metabolic pathway modeling
Signaling networks
Systems biology approaches to biomarker identification
Rational drug design methods
Metabolic Reconstruction
Protein Structure Prediction
Protein Function Prediction
Protein-protein interaction networks


SUBMISSION OF POSTER PRESENTATIONS

We invite you  to apply for poster presentations on topics of
relevance to the workshop. Each poster presentation should be
described in a 1 page summary and be submitted by August 20, 2008 via
the Easychair submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mlsb08

Formatting instructions are given on the workshop website
http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/services/stochastic/mlsb08/submission.html


IMPORTANT DATES

-       20 August: deadline for submissions of poster presentations
-       25 August: notification of acceptance to authors

-       13-14 September: workshop


LOCATION


The workshop will take in place Brussels at the Palais des Académies
of Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de
Belgique.


CONTACT


For further information, please contact mlsb08 at gmail.com or see
the conference website:
http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/services/stochastic/mlsb08


MLSB08 CHAIRS


Louis Wehenkel and Pierre Geurts, GIGA-Research, University of Liège,
Belgium
Florence d’Alché-Buc, IBISC CNRS FRE 2873, University of
Evry-Val d’Essonne, France
Yves Moreau, ESAT, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium


SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMME COMMITTEE


Florence d’Alché-Buc (University of Evry, France)
Christophe Ambroise (University of Evry, France)
Pierre Geurts (University of Liège, Belgium)
Mark Girolami (University of Glasgow, UK)
Samuel Kaski (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Kathleen Marchal (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Elena Marchiori (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Yves Moreau (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Gunnar Rätsch (FML, Max Planck Society, Tübingen)
Juho Rousu (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Céline Rouveirol (University of Paris XIII, France)
Yvan Saeys (University of Gent, Belgium)
Rodolphe Sepulchre (University of Liège, Belgium)
Koji Tsuda (Max Planck Institute, Tuebingen)
Jacques Van Helden (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
Kristel Van Steen (University of Liège, Belgium)
Jean-Philippe Vert (Ecole des Mines, France)
Louis Wehenkel (University of Liège, Belgium)
David Wild (University of Warwick, UK)
Jean-Daniel Zucker (University of Paris XIII, France)