HealthGrid 2010 Conference

nathanael.verhaeghe@healthgrid.org — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:21:00 +0200

The HealthGrid2010 conference, held in Paris from June 28th to June 30th, has gathered many scientists from 19 different countries belonging to the 5 continents. They presented the latest achievements and discussed the latest developments in the fields of grid-based research of biology, medicine and health.

Keynote speakers addressed the challenges of e-Health and e-Infrastructures while high level presentations took place under the 4 broad headings : ‘Socio Economic Aspects and Accessibility’, ‘Future of Grids, Core Technologies & Data Integration’, ‘Applications’ and ‘Poster Extended Abstracts. An interesting outcome of the conference was the opportunity given to a variety of NGIs and and EU biomedical projects to present their vision about the future of research using grids, during a plenary Life Science Virtual Research Community workshop. The workshop resulted in further consultation with the Life Science community and defined the roadmap for the LS communities support mechanisms required, through exploring several sustainable options with key representatives from the communities with the strong commitment of several NGIs.

The GridCast team have been blogging directly from the conference, all interviews, posts and videos can be watched in their website.

HealthGrid organizers want to thank all the participants for the invaluable contributions during the conference and wish to convey their gratefulness to all actors in the Life Science communities, the projects and the European Commission for their continuous support to the HealthGrid Initiative.

Ash Cloud disrupts ACGT Grid meeting

nathanael.verhaeghe@healthgrid.org — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:23:00 +0200

« Ladies and gentlemen, we will be beginning our decent into Heraklion International Airport, the captain has turned on the fasten seat-belt sign. In preparation for landing, your seat belt must be fasten, your seat must be in an upright position… » is the speech that most the ACGT members have not heard when trying to reach the Consortium meeting planned in the capital of Crete 19-21 of April. Indeed, a sequence of major volcanic events at Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland affected flights all across Europe, preventing ACGT partners to reach the project management meeting venue.

The situation was the following: the project coordinator stuck in Roma in transit from Chicago to Crete, a scientific coordinator actually present in Heraklion (as the meeting is planned in his institute) and the remaining partners dispersed in different locations worldwide. The only partner who was able to reach Heraklion was coming from Japan (Hokkaido University). The discussions have taken place in small group, between FORTH and Hokkaido University, while others started the challenging choice for a new date. By avoiding the numerous public holidays in Europe in May and June, the meeting has been finally postponed to June 14-16, 2010, in the same location : Heraklion.

The Institute of Earth Sciences and the Icelandic Meteorological Office detected no ash or magma at Eyjafjallajökull on May 24 or May 25, concluding that the eruption is dormant. Let’s hope to have this « sleeping situation » remaining until the meeting …

Call for Papers of the Special Session on GRID, PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED BIOINFORMATICS APPLICATIONS

nathanael.verhaeghe@healthgrid.org — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:05:00 +0200

19th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and network-based Processing (PDP 2011), 9-11 February 2011 in Ayia Napa, Cyprus

Bioinformatics is a discipline that aims to perform analysis of complex biological systems using a computer science approach, with the result of producing huge amounts of data. The major issue is represented by the need to turn this information into real knowledge, therefore the potential of exploiting parallel computing and distributed solutions in this field is clear. Porting applications and developing new systems on computer clusters improves performance when addressing genome wide analysis. Moreover, distributed technology such as Grid computing represents an emerging solution for establishing platforms to deal with data produced using new high throughput technology and gives researchers scalable solutions.

The aim of this special session is to present the latest efforts in parallel and distributed bioinformatics applications in grid computing. We are especially interested in parallel algorithms and libraries for biological analysis and tools to perform large scale computation on distributed platforms like the Grid.

Topics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Biological databases for high throughput analysis
Parallel Algorithms for genomics and proteomics
DNA assembly, clustering, and mapping
Bio-Molecular sequence based analysis
Gene identification and annotation
SNP analysis and classification
Gene expression Microarray analysis
Tissue Microarray pattern recognition
Systems biology and pathway analysis
Phylogeny reconstruction algorithms
Molecular dynamics simulation
Structural analysis for prediction and modelling
Parallel architectures for biological applications
System infrastructure for high-performance bio-computing

Submission
Authors should submit a full paper not exceeding 5000 words in length and including a 150-200 word abstract. To facilitate an anonymous reviewing process, the first page of the paper should contain only the title and abstract; moreover names of authors should not appear in citations in the Reference section.

Authors of accepted papers are expected to register and present their papers at the Conference.

Important Dates:
16 July 2010: Closing date for submissions
04 Oct. 2010: Notification
29 Oct. 2010: Camera-ready versions
9-11 Feb. 2011: Conference

Details for submission of papers are available at the conference website.

Session Chairs
Daniele D'Agostino, IMATI-CNR, Italy
Ivan Merelli, ITB-CNR, Italy

Call for papers: Jornadas de Bioinformatica 2010

nathanael.verhaeghe@healthgrid.org — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:51:00 +0200

The "X Jornadas de Bioinformática" will be held in Málaga from 27th to 29th October 2010, organized by the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute in collaboration with the Portuguese Bioinformatics Network and hosted by the University of Malaga (Spain).

The aim is to provide a forum to present and discuss the lines of research and development of national and international groups working on Bioinformatics.

This year the conference will dedicate special attention to the area of "Bioinformatics for personalized medicine"

The Program Committee seeks contributions in the following areas (not limited to):

Analysis of high throughput data (NGS)
Structural Bioinformatics
Algorithms for computational biology and HPC
Sequence analysis, phylogenetics and evolution
Databases, Tools and technologies for computational biology
Bioinformatics in Transcriptomics and Proteomics
System and Synthetic Biology

Together with a number of invited talks, this edition will also hold the 'Highlights session' where selected papers published in the previous year will be presented.

All communications will be in English.

Submissions of papers and communications will not exceed 1 page for abstracts or 4 pages for papers. Both oral and poster submissions are accepted. Posters will be displayed during the meeting and a number of
papers will be selected for oral presentation in the meeting. Extended version of selected papers will be invited to beevaluated for publication in a journal after the meeting. All submissions will appear in the workshop proceedings.

Submissions for the highlight session must include a short abstract describing the main interest of the paper, the PDF of the published paper and the author that will present the work.

Submission instructions and templates will be available at the website of the conference: www.jbi2010.es

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for submission of papers and highlight proposals: 5th September
Notification of acceptance: 21st September
Deadline for submission of final paper: 28th September
Early Registration deadline: 30th September

**** CALL FOR ADDITIONAL CONFERENCE TUTORIALS ****

JBI 2010 will feature a series of tutorials the 27th October. Proposals for tutorials, covering a specific theme (NGS, Personalized Medicine, Web Technologies etc.) and lasting about half a day are encouraged and solicited until September 5th, 2010.

IMPORTANT DATES

Workshop and tutorial submission deadline: 5th September
Workshop and tutorial acceptance notification: 19th September

For further details, visit the conference website.

A GUI application to ease the creation of of ACGT compliant Web Service!

nathanael.verhaeghe@healthgrid.org — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:26:00 +0200

The Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center has developed a GUI application that can be helpful for creation of ACGT compliant Web Service using Tomcat/Axis technologies.
It is a kind of wizard that can lead you through the implementation process. You can find description of it on ACGT wiki.

The application can be downloaded here.