WCB08 - Workshop on
Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics
May 22th, 2008 PARIS
associated to CPAIOR 2008

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. For instance, Haplotype/Pedigree inference, Motif localization, alignments, ...
  • 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)
    • These (and other) problems can be naturally formalized using constraint programming.

    The main aim of this workshop is twofold. On the one hand, to share recent results in this area (new ideas and/or systems, relying on constraints, but also on linear programming, Mixed Integer Linear Programming, Local Search, and any other AI techniques, possibly combining some of them). On the other hand, to present new challenging problems recently formalized but still far from admitting an acceptable solutions.

    See also the web pages/proceedings of the previous editions: WCB05, WCB06, WCB07, and the forthcoming special issue of the Constraints Journal on the same topics.

    Program Committee
    Important Info and Dates
    Rolf Backofen Freiburg Univ., Germany (co-chair)
    Pedro Barahona Univ. Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
    Alexander Bockmayr Freie Univ. Berlin, Germany
    Mats Carlsson SICS, Uppsala Sweden
    Alessandro Dal Palù Univ. of Parma, Italy
    Simon De Givry INRA, Toulouse, France
    Maria Garcia de la Banda Monash Univ., Australia
    David Gilbert Glasgow Univ., UK
    Agostino Dovier Udine Univ., Italy (co-chair)
    Francois Fages INRIA Rocquencourt, France (co-chair)
    Inês Lynce INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
    Enrico Pontelli NMSU (USA)
    Peter Stuckey Univ. of Melbourne
    Sebastian Will Freiburg Univ., Germany
    		Submitted papers can be
    • Extended Abstracts of new results or
    • Abstract of ongoing works
    • Systems presentations (with demos at the workshop)
    • Summaries of already accepted or recently published results
    in any topic concerning bioinformatics and constraints and close techniques. Submission style is the standard llncs style. Page limit is 6 pages. Please send the pdf or ps via email to the three co-chairs.

    Submission Deadline: March 15, 2008
    Notification to Authors: April 15, 2008
    Camera-ready (including latex file) due: April 30, 2008(strict!)
    Workshop: May 22, 2008.

    Participiation of at least one author is mandatory.