Announcement: AFP-SIG'05: Automated Function Prediction,
June 24, 2005, Detroit, MI, USA. 
An ISMB 2005 Special Interest Group meeting.
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http://ffas.burnham.org/AFP 

Call for Abstracts, Servers, and Sponsors
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The deluge of genomic information begs the following question: what do all
these genes do? Many genes are not annotated, and many more are partially or
erroneously annotated. Given a genome which is partially annotated at best,
how do we fill in the blanks? We are faced with the problem of predicting
protein function from sequence, genomic, expression, interaction and
structural data.  For all these reasons and many more, automated function
prediction is rapidly gaining interest among computational biologists. We are
pleased to announce that the first Automated Function Prediction (AFP)
meeting will be held as a Special Interest Group satellite meeting (SIG) of
ISMB05. This will be an opportunity for computational biology groups involved
in function prediction to discuss the latest research in the field.
Additionally, we will be challenging publicly available function prediction
servers to predict the function for a set of select targets. The results of
this challenge will be discussed at the meeting.

The organizing committee of AFP is currently seeking speakers for AFP
2005. Talks are sought in, but not limited to, the following topics:

  * Function prediction using sequence based methods. This would
    include "classic" methods such as detection of functional motifs
    and inferring function from sequence similarity.
  * Function from genomic information: prediction by genomic location;
    locus comparison with other organisms; function gain and loss.
  * Phylogeny based methods
  * Function from molecular interactions
  * Function from structure
  * Function prediction using combined methods
  * "Meta-talks" discussing the limitations and horizons of
    computational function prediction.
  * Towards a function prediction competition: assessing function
    prediction programs

We are also seeking servers for the function prediction assessment. If your
group has such a server, we would be very happy if you contact us. Servers
will be challenged with a select set of targets, the results assessed and
discussed at the meeting in an open and collaborative fashion. Obviously,
this first meeting will be more concerned with defining this complex and
challenging problem, and planning the means to attack it. We would like to
stress that the data submission, result collection and assessment will be
done by the AFP assessment team.

Finally, we are seeking sponsors for the meeting. Organizations which would
like to get involved are welcome to contact the organizing committee for
sponsorship details.

Further details on all the above are available at the AFP-SIG site:
http://ffas.burnham.org/AFP

We are very excited about this new venture, and we hope to see many of
you in Detroit in June.


Adam Godzik & Iddo Friedberg, in the name of the AFP-SIG organizing committee

Contact:
Iddo Friedberg, Ph.D.
The Burnham Institute
10901 N. Torrey Pines Rd.
La Jolla, CA 92037 USA
Tel: +1 (858) 646 3100 x3516
Fax: +1 (858) 713 9930
idoerg@burnham.org