Altman, R., Brutlag, D., Karp, P. and Searls, D. Editors (1994). Second International Conference on Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 483,pages.
This volume comprises the archived proceedings of the Second
International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology
(ISMB), held at Stanford University from August 15 to 17, 1994. The
overwhelming success of the first conference produced high
expectations for the quality and size of this year's meeting. The
organizing committee is pleased to report some basic facts about the
meeting that bode well for the future:
First, the response to our invitation for program committee
membership was enthusiastic and swift. The program committee consists
of biologists and computer scientists who are actively contributing
to the interdisciplinary area of computational molecular biology. We
note the truly international character of the program committee, as
well as the increasing number of participating women scientists.
Second, the call for papers produced 86 submissions of high quality.
'These submissions were rigorously reviewed by three members of the
program committee, and disagreements on the merits of individual
papers were mediated by one of the organizers. The efforts of the
program committee constitute strong evidence that the standards of
productivity and communication in this field are high.
Third, the call for tutorial proposals produced nine accepted
tutorials of high quality. Taught by distinguished members of the
community (including many program committee members), the tutorials
offered participants the opportunity to update or augment their
knowledge of allied disciplines. The tutorials (and tutors) were
Information Science for Molecular Biologists (Doug Brutlag),
Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists (Gary Stormo), Minimal
Length Encoding in Molecular Biology (Aleksandar Milosavljevic),
Machine Learning in Molecular Biology (Pierre Baldi), Computational
Challenges for Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (Russ Altman
and Peter Karp), Neural Networks (David Bisant), Constraint
Satisfaction in Molecular Biology (Christopher Rawlings and Dominic
Clark), Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming (John Koza), and
Hidden Markov Models, SCFGs, and Related Models (David Haussler).
Fourth, three outstanding speakers agreed to give the conference
addresses: Bruce Buchanan, University of Pittsburgh, provided the
keynote and Lawrence Hunter, National Library of Medicine, and
Richard Roberts, New England BioLabs, gave the plenary addresses.
Fifth, the response of funding agencies to our re -quests for support
was uniformly enthusiastic. In particular, we were able to secure
funds to support the travel of students, postdoctoral fellows, women
and underrepresented minority scientists. We would like to thank the
funding agencies that have sup -ported the conference this year: the
National Library of Medicine and National Center for Human Genome
Research (both of the National Institutes of Health), the
Computational Biology section of the National Science Foundation, and
the Department of Energy, Office of Health and Environmental
Research. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence has
provided support for the publication of these Proceedings.
Finally, we have already identified a venue for ISMB-95: Cambridge,
England. Dominic Clark and Christopher Rawlings, both of the Imperial
Cancer Research Fund, will host the meeting, which will have been
held in the eastern United States, western United States, and Europe.
We hope that potential hosts from the Pacific Rim will consider
organizing ISMB-96.
Preparation for this meeting has been a learning experience for all
involved. One of the key issues that surfaced during the planning
phases was the proper scope for the meeting. There can be conflict
between the goals of computer scientists and those of biologists
especially in the process of reviewing and organizing papers for
presentation. The historical roots of this conference in artificial
intelligence and molecular biology remain. There are, however,
related disciplines that are also relevant to the production of
complex computer systems for solving problems in molecular biology,
including (but not limited to) mathematical biology. robotics,
discrete mathematics, linguistics, systems engineering, theoretical
physics, combinatorial chemistry, biochemistry, and biophysics. It is
our hope that ISMB will become the major forum for computational
molecular biology. The common denominator will be the expectation
that new theoretical approaches are accompanied by computer
implementations that allow evaluation, testing, and deployment of new
technologies that have an impact on biology. If this meeting
continues to grow in importance, it will become a forum for
presenting major innovations in computational molecular biology. We
believe that many of these innovations will be, in some sense,
"intelligent."
We have noted that there is a growing cadre of investigators whose
discipline is neither computer science nor molecular biology, but is
in the area of overlap between these. Lacking a dear niche within
traditional disciplines, these investigators need opportunities to
meet one another, establish a core literature, and develop a set of
fundamental scientific premises. This should be the big conference
for those who want to hear about major breakthroughs in dynamic
programming, multiple sequence alignment, the federation of molecular
biology databases, hidden Markov models for sequence analysis,
constraint satisfaction techniques for map assembly or structure
definition, probabilistic modeling of biological structures and
sequences, simulation of metabolic processes, heuristic ways to
search large hypothesis spaces, the theory of neural networks, energy
functions that fold protein structures more accurately, search
algorithms for protein conformation, linguistic parsing techniques
for sequence analysis, novel map reconstruction algorithms,
computational geometry breakthroughs for drug design, robotic
applications to molecular structure, and more.
We would like to thank the individuals whose efforts contributed to
creating the meeting and the proceedings: Gustavo Galindo, Kevin
Lauderdale, Irene Zagazeta. and Rosalind Ravasio have contributed to
an excellent team effort. Mike Hamilton at AAAI Press has once again
produced a proceedings of top quality.
-Russ Altman, Douglas Brutlag, Peter Karp, Rick Lathrop & David
Searls
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