We feel that the time is right for another highly visible special year thrust, like the one in 1994-95. At the time of our first special year, there was a need to address, review, and coordinate a variety of topics and methods, as well as to introduce many people to the field. Computational biology prior to the first special year was largely focused on a few problems such as alignments, physical mapping, and reconstructing phylogenies. Other topics have begun to be investigated in a much more far-reaching way using methods of computer science, for example problems involving gene finding and motif recognition, protein and RNA folding, protein structure prediction, and linkage analysis. Moreover, it is our expectation that we can establish and nurture lines of communication and collaboration so that the new methods of information science that arise from the special focus can be quickly adapted to biological applications, and can be readily communicated to the biological community.
Some funds are available for travel and local support.
Those with suggestions for workshops or interested in participating are encouraged to contact any member of the organizing committee by email. This workshop will focus on combinatorial algorithms and probabilistic models for the analysis and cross-annotation of biological data in diverse databases. The rapid accumulation of biological data has led to one of history's largest and growing collections of unstructured, loosely related databases. Most of the useful relationships in this haphazard collection of data are the direct result of a laborious task of manual annotation and experimentation. At the current pace at which new biological information becomes available, the ability to automatically cluster, classify, and annotate it across the traditional boundaries of individual databases is becoming an increasingly critical need.