[Biodevelopers] Announcement: Automated Function Prediction SIG, June 24, 2005

[Iddo Friedberg]

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

Call for Abstracts, Servers, and Sponsorship
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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 noted and discussed at the meeting. Similar assessment
projects such as the biannual CAFASP and the ongoing LiveBench have
become the de-facto benchmark for structure prediction servers. We
hope to achieve a similar result for function prediction with this
assessment. 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.

Sincerely,

Iddo Friedberg, in the name of the AFP Organizing Committee

-- 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 http://ffas.ljcrf.edu/~iddo