WCB 07: Workshop on Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics

WCB07 - Workshop on Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics September 13, 2007, Porto, Portugal Computer Science Department Associated to ICLP 2007

Topics. Bioinformatics is a challenging and fast growing area of research, which is of utmost importance for our understanding of life. Major contributions to this discipline can have thousands of positive effects in medicine, agriculture, or industry. To pick out only a few examples, Bioinformatics tackles problems related to: Recognition, analysis, and organization of DNA sequences Biological systems simulations (for metabolic or regulatory networks) Prediction of the spatial conformation of a biological polymer, given its sequence of monomers (in particular for proteins and RNA) All these problems can be naturally formalized using constraints over finite domains or intervals of reals. Biology is a source of extremely interesting and challenging problems that can be encoded exploiting the application of recent and more general techniques of constraint programming. In this framework, some problems that have been successfully tackled are: The fundamental bioinformatics problem of sequence alignment can be solved by recent inference based constraint methods Biological systems simulations can be easily designed using concurrent constraint programming, and The constrained-based prediction of protein conformations promoted the development of new search strategies, new constraint solvers, and general symmetry breaking. The main aim of this workshop is twofold. On the one hand, to share recent results in this area (new constraint solvers, new prediction and simulation programs). On the other hand, to present new challenging problems formalized and/or solved with constraint based methods. See also last year workshop details: WCB06.

Program Committee

Important Dates (provisionary)

Rolf Backofen (co-chair) Freiburg Univ., Germany Pedro Barahona Univ. Nova de Lisbona, Portugal Alexander Bockmayr Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Mats Carlsson SICS, Uppsala Sweden Alessandro Dal Palù (co-chair) Parma Univ., Italy David Gilbert University of Glasgow Simon De Givry INRA, Toulouse, France Agostino Dovier Udine Univ., Italy Francois Fages INRIA Rocquencourt, France Enrico Pontelli NMSU (USA) Sebastian Will (co-chair) Freiburg Univ., Germany

Submission Deadline: June 11 (extended) Notification to Authors: July 6 Camera-ready (including latex file) due: July 22 Workshop/Conference Registration Workshop: September 13