26th – 28th June 2014

This year’s eleventh edition of the International Meeting on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (CIBB 2014) will be hosted by the Computer Laboratory, Department of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge.

As the CIBB2014 website explains:

“Molecular Biology is an exciting experimental field that is producing an explosion of new data. In recent years, a number of developments have enabled Bioinformatics and Biostatistics methodologies to keep pace. CIBB is a meeting with a 10-year history of convening bioinformaticians and biostatisticians to discuss cutting edge methodologies and accelerate life science discovery. Following its roots, this year’s forum will discuss problems concerning computational techniques in bioinformatics, systems biology, medical informatics and biostatistics.”

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Next Generation Sequencing Bioinformatics, Multi omics integration; Methods for the integration of clinical and genetic data; Algorithms for alternative splicing analysis; Methods for the functional classification of genes; Methods for the unsupervised analysis, validation and visualization of structures discovered in bio-molecular data; Prediction of protein structures; Mass spectrometry data analysis in proteomics; Methods for comparative genomics; Algorithms for molecular evolution and phylogenetic analysis; Mathematical modelling and simulation of biological systems; Systems and synthetic biology; Heterogeneous data integration and data fusion for diagnostics; Bio-molecular databases and data mining; Algorithms for pharmacogenetics; Bio-medical text mining and imaging; Modelling and evaluation methods for diagnosis and prognosis; Software tools for bioinformatics.

Programme and Proceedings

The scientific program will include, besides some plenary talks, contributed papers that will be presented in plenary oral and poster sessions. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. A selection of papers presented at CIBB 2014 will be published as a post conference volume printed by an international publisher. Moreover, the event organisers are planning to publish the best papers in extended form in a special issue of BMC Bioinformatics.

Keynote speakers

Lorenz Wernisch, Programme Leader from the MRC Biostatistics Unit will be among the keynote speakers, taking part in the Causality in Genomics session with a talk titled “Inference of sparse structural equation models from static data”: Dynamic data for the inference of networks with feedback loops are notalways available. Under certain assumptions they can still be inferred,including latent variables, using a structural equation framework. Nonlinearrelationships and non-Gaussian noise facilitate identification of networkseven though they make inference more difficult. However, with populationbased MCMC and stochastic search methods it is possible to find mediumsized networks.

Biostatistics

Free topics

• Monica Chiogna, University of Padova, Italy
• Chris Holmes, University of Oxford, UK
• Jean Michel Marin, University of Montpellier II

Causality in Genomics

• Carlo Berzuini, University of Manchester, UK
• Stephen Burgess, University of Cambridge, UK
• Vanessa Didelez, University of Bristol, UK
• Florian Markowetz, Cancer Research UK – CRI, Cambridge, UK
• Lorenz Wernisch, MRC – BSU, Cambridge, UK

Bioinformatics

Free topics

• Ezio Bartocci, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• Francesco Falciani, University of Liverpool, UK
• Jasmin Fisher, University of Cambridge, UK
• David Gilbert, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
• Syed Haider, University of Cambridge, UK
• Jeanine J. Houwing-Duistermaat, Leiden University Medical Centre, The Netherlands
• Marta Kwiatkowska, University of Oxford, UK
• Pedro Mendes, Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, UK
• Marie-France Sagot, Université Claude Bernard, France
• Marco Viceconti, University of Sheffield, UK

Special Session: Spatial Problems in the Nucleus

• Julien Mozziconacci, Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, France

For further details on CIBB 2014 please visit http://www.cussb.unisr.it/cibb2014/

Credits: All the above information has been produced by the CIBB2014 organisers.

Note:

Professor Sylvia Richardson has participated in the organizing committee of the event as General Chair. She is the Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit and holds a Research Professorship in the University of Cambridge since 2012. She has worked extensively in many areas of biostatistics research and made important contributions to the statistical modelling of complex biomedical data, in particular from a Bayesian perspective. Her recent research has focussed on modelling and analysis of large data problems such as those arising in statistical genomics.