Call for Workshop Proposals
2024 ISBRA Conference – July 19-21, 2024 (Kunming, China)

The 20^th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ISBRA) provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and results among researchers, developers, and practitioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. Submissions presenting original research are solicited in all areas of bioinformatics and computational biology, including the development of experimental or commercial systems.

The 2024 ISBRA conference is the premier conference that is dedicated to promoting No-Boundary Thinking to address science challenges with broad participation and frontier research linking computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, statistics, biology, medicine, bioinformatics, and biomedical and health informatics.

ISBRA focuses on the grand challenges for life science, bioscience and human health by showcasing leading-edge research on new technologies, methods, and tools around the processing, integration, analysis, mining, retrieval, interpretation, and presentation of data and determine how to transform data into meaningful information and actionable knowledge, with the aim of defining problems as well as solving problems in life science, biomedical discovery, public and population health, disease prevention, and healthcare delivery.

Examples of relevant workshop topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• AI and Machine Learning in Medicine and Healthcare
• Computational Drug Discovery
• Sequence Analysis
• Single cell sequencing
• Omics Data Integration and Analysis
• Genomic Variation and Disease
• Haplotypes and Population Genomics
• Phylogenetics
• Protein and RNA Analysis, Structure, and Dynamics
• Metagenomics and Algorithms for Microbiomes
• Cancer Genomics
• Pharmacogenomics
• Systems Biology
• Biological Networks and Integrative Analysis
• Multimodality modeling
• Imaging Informatics
• Imaging Genomics and Radiation Genomics
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text mining
• Large language model (LLM) for healthcare applications
• Data Integration, Harmonization, and Ontology
• Computational Phenotyping
• Automated Diagnosis and Prediction
• Clinical Databases and Information Systems
• Data Security and Privacy
• Knowledge Representation Applications
• Biomedical and Health Data Visualization
• Public Health and Population Health Informatics
• Infectious Disease Networks and Computational Epidemiology
• Social Network Analysis for Health Applications
• No-Boundary Thinking in Bioinformatics

Each workshop proposal can be up to 5 pages to include the following information:

• Motivation and rationale for the workshop
• Proposed workshop length: half day, or a full-day with a lunchtime break
• Names and affiliations of main organizers
• A description of the workshop format, i.e. peer-reviewed proceedings, position papers and invited talks, panels, in-depth tutorials/demos:
  • For peer-reviewed sessions, the planned peer-reviewed process should be detailed;
  • For invited talks, names of a list of potential list of speakers should be provided;
  • For panels, the main topic along with a list of panel questions to be addressed, along with names of a potential list of panelists should be provided;
  • For teaching workshops, a draft syllabus should be provided;
  • For demonstration workshops, a general outline of the planned activities and prerequisite materials needed should be described.
• A detailed timeline for inviting and accepting papers and presenters for the workshop should be presented:
• If there is going to be a proceedings for the workshop, would you like the proceedings to appear alongside ACM-BCB proceedings?
• An important goal of the workshops is to engage participants via interactions and/or community building. Each proposal is expected to describe its plans to achieve this goal.
• Any other relevant information to your proposal workshop (e.g. has the proposed workshop be done in the past and in other venues? If so, when and where?).

For the continuing workshops (i.e., the workshops have been held at previous BCB conferences), a shorter proposal is expected and include the following information:

• Proposed workshop length: half day, or a full-day with a lunchtime break
• Names and affiliations of main organizers
• A detailed timeline for inviting and accepting papers and presenters for the workshop should be presented:
• If there is going to be a proceedings for the workshop, would you like the proceedings to appear alongside ACM-BCB proceedings?
• Past year experiences, lessons learned, and plan to improve.
• Any changes of plans compared to last year.

Individuals submitting workshops are requested to implement the proposed plan only after hearing about the final acceptance notification of the proposed workshop.

Submission procedure:

Each workshop proposal can be up to 5 pages. The proposers are requested to address all the details listed above in their proposal. Workshop proposals/descriptions will be published in the proceedings. Submitted proposals should comply with the requirements delineated on the ACM Master Article Template website.

Submissions and inquiries should be sent to @googlegroups.com

Important Dates:

Workshop proposal deadline: April 22, 2024
Notification of acceptance: May 9, 2024
Workshops will be held on September 3, 2024

Workshop Co-Chairs:

Weihua Guan, University of Minnesota
Wei Zhang, University of Central Florida