[BiO BB] PHYSICS BASED TECHNIQUES IN BIOINFORMATICS IN METMBS-03

[Himanshu Agrawal]

SUBJECT: PHYSICS BASED TECHNIQUES IN BIOINFORMATICS IN METMBS'03

Dear Colleagues,

The 2003 International Conference on Mathematics and Engineering
Techniques in Medicine and Biological Sciences (METMBS '03) is going
to be held Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA during June 23 -
26, 2003 [see http://metmbs.sdsu.edu/].

The conference covers nearly all engineering and mathematical aspects
of biological and medical sciences including the rapidly upcoming area
of BIOINFORMATICS.

In recent years BIOINFORMATICS has attracted attention of physicists
and, in return, been enriched through a number of physics based
techniques for addressing various problems related to informatics of
various types of biological data. In fact, some abstract and unsolved
problems of physics find impressive applications in bioinformatics.
The developments, however, are by no means complete and there is
enormous scope for development of new and more advanced techniques.
The most important advantage of these techniques is that they have a
very sound physical footing.

More recently, techniques for processing data obtained from various
biological chips [gene chips (oligonucleotide arrays/microarrays, cDNA
microarrays), protein chips, etc.] have become the focus of attention,
e.g., for clustering the data, for extracting gene networks from the
data, etc. In this exercise also, the physics based techniques seem to
be taking lead very rapidly. These techniques seem to be benefiting
from the enormous archive of knowledge of physics accumulated over
more than a century.

Presently it is necessary and also timely to discuss various aspects
of the various physics based bioinformatics techniques in a common
forum. Such a discussion is likely to generate new ideas, lead to
comparison of different techniques, open up new vistas of development,
and lead to improvement in existing techniques. To this end Prof.
Valafar (Chair, METBMS'03) has agreed to include a session on "Physics
based techniques in Bioinformatics" in METMBS'03.

In case you are interested in participating and benefiting from this
activity and would like to contribute, send A SHORT ONE PAGE ABSTRACT
to feagrawa at wicc.weizmann.ac.il (by March 3, 2003). Email submissions
are encouraged (there is no time for any other form of submission). In
the subject of the email write: METMBS-03 <last_name_of_first_author>.

The deadline for abstract submission for this session has been
extended till Monday March 3, 2003. We may be able to accept some very
deserving abstracts till Thursday March 6, 2003 but not after that.
Acceptance of late abstracts is not guaranteed and late submissions
are strongly discouraged. Other details are as given on the conference
web page http://metmbs.sdsu.edu/.

For this session we are specifically looking for (but not restricted
to) papers related to various aspects of physics based bioinformatics
techniques (including methods, results, algorithms, etc). Comparison
of physics based techniques to others and physical justifications of
techniques that not specifically grounded on physics are also welcome.

Young bioinformaticians are especially encouraged to participate.

Author of accepted papers will be notified by March 21, 2003. The full
version of accepted papers can be up to 7 pages and should be
submitted by April 22, 2003.

Hoping to see you soon,

Best Regards,

-Himanshu Agrawal

Dept. of Physics of Complex Systems  Phone: +972-8-9342475/3960 (Office)
Weizmann Institute of Science        FAX:   +972-8-9344109 (Office)
Rehovot 76100, Israel                Email: feagrawa at wicc.weizmann.ac.il
                                     URL:   www.weizmann.ac.il/~feagrawa