Dear colleague, The Summer School on Machine Learning in Drug Design will take place on August 20-22, 2018 in Leuven, Belgium. This Summer School will bring together the machine learning, chemoinformatics, and bioinformatics communities from academia and industry to tackle the challenges of complex data integration in drug design and discovery. The format of the event will combine multiple keynote presentations, oral contributions selected from submitted abstracts, and extensive poster sessions with ample time for discussion. As this is an emerging area, the event will aim at giving good exposure to promising junior researchers. We invite you to submit your short abstract for oral presentation or poster by July 22, 2018 (extended deadline) at http://mldd.esat.kuleuven.be <http://mldd.esat.kuleuven.be/>. Please forward this announcement to members of your team and to interested colleagues. More information is available below and at http://mldd.esat.kuleuven.be <http://mldd.esat.kuleuven.be/>, or by email at mldd@esat.kuleuven.be <mailto:mldd@esat.kuleuven.be>. Apologies for multiple postings. Best regards, Prof. Yves Moreau, University of Leuven Prof. Sepp Hochreiter, Johannes Kepler University of Linz Prof. Samuel Kaski, Aalto University SCOPE The data sets amenable to mining for drug design are rapidly expanding. This holds not only for the volume of conventional annotation of chemicals (i.e., representations of their chemical structure and their activities in a growing set of validated assays). It also goes for less conventional data sources, such as cellular microscopy or gene expression profiles of chemicals acquired at high throughput. Powerful novel machine learning methods unleashed on these massive volumes of heterogeneous and rich, but noisy and biased data, hold the promise of better and safer drugs to address unmet medical needs. To deliver on that promise, the Summer School calls on the machine learning, big data analytics, cheminformatics and bioinformatics communities to join forces and strengthen collaborative work at the interface of their disciplines. The Summer School will bring together contributors from both academia and industry to foster interdisciplinary exchange in this area where the need for expertise is growing rapidly. Contributions will cover recent advances in chemogenomics, strategies for data fusion, and machine learning. PRELIMINARY INVITED SPEAKER PROGRAM * Djork-Arné Clevert (Bayer): Deep learning for proteochemometric modeling * Gerard van Westen (Leiden University): Combining cheminformatics and bioinformatics through deep learning * Gilles Marcou (University of Strasbourg): Chemical space modeling and visualization with Generative Topographic Maps * Günter Klambauer (JKU Linz): Boosting drug discovery with deep learning * Florian Nigsch (Novartis): From heterogeneous data to highly predictive models and their applications in early drug discovery * Daniel Reker (MIT): Machine learning for natural product target prediction and chemogenomic data compression * Tim Becker (Harvard University): Machine learning and deep learning to predict drug-target activity from high-content imaging * Thomas Blaschke (AstraZeneca): The rise of deep learning in drug discovery * Val Gillet (University of Sheffield): TBA INTENDED AUDIENCE AND FORMAT The summer school is intended for academic and industry researchers in machine learning, chemoinformatics, or bioinformatics who are either currently working at the interface between these fields or want to expand their skills to link these three areas. The summer school is also intended as a bridge between academia and industry. The format of the event will combine comprehensive invited presentations, oral contributions selected from submitted abstracts, and extensive poster sessions with ample time for discussion. ABSTRACT SUBMISSION Participants are invited to submit abstracts for oral contributions and posters by July 22, 2018 (extended deadline). Abstracts can submitted for consideration for oral presentation (up to 1,000 words) or for consideration as poster only (up to 250 words). Abstracts selected for oral presentation will be notified by July 25, 2018. Abstracts will be available as a book of abstracts and online, but there will be no full proceedings. REGISTRATION AND FEE Early registration fee (before July 20, 2018): €180 (including VAT) Late registration fee (before August 13, 2018): €300 (including VAT) The fee covers participation to the meeting and includes coffee breaks and lunch (sandwich lunch). VENUE The Summer School will be held at the Irish College, a beautifully restored historical building in the center of Leuven, Belgium.