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Call for problems

Call for Problem statements

We invite biological problem statements from the fields of biology and bioinformatics.

Modern experimentation and data acquisition techniques allow the study of complex interactions in biological systems, but yield very large quantities of data. This raises interesting challenges as how to analyze, interpret and exploit the data.

The field of data mining and machine learning is concerned with algorithms to analyze data, the automatic discovery of useful patterns and insights, and the exploitation of the acquired knowledge to improve performance in prediction tasks on unseen data.

Recent advances in computational techniques allow processing of complex relational information such as interaction networks, phylogenetic trees or interconnected databases (genes, diseases, publications) even in the presence of uncertainty and noise.

This workshop aims at bringing the two communities together so that interesting biological problem statements and advanced machine learning methods can be effectively and fruitfully discussed. In order to favour this exchange, a special session for the presentation of open research problems by the biology community will be organized in addition to the invited talks and paper presentations.

We therefore invite statements of biological problems that should preferably contain the following elements:

  • a short description of the problem background
  • a description of the available data
  • a description of the sources of uncertainty and noise in the problem
  • a description of what questions the domain experts would like to have answered
A mathematical formulation of the problem can help a better understanding by the data mining community. If desired, the program committee can help in streamlining the problem formalization.

Submission Guidelines

  • Page limit for problem statements: 4 pages
  • Formatting: Submitted papers should be formatted according to the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence guidelines. Authors' instructions and style files can be downloaded from http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
  • Papers can be submitted by E-mail to the following address: strebio08@cs.kuleuven.be
Note that, as for all the ECML Workshops, accepted problem statements will be printed in the informal proceedings and made available at the time of the Workshop.