Call for papers
MEDA-2017
Workshop on Curative Power of MEdical DAta
14 Sept. 2017
Constanța, Romania

A satellite event of EUROLAN-2017
Summer School on Biomedical Text Processing
http://eurolan.info.uaic.ro/2017/index.html

Description
In an era when massive amounts of medical data became available, researchers working in biological, biomedical and clinical domains have increasingly started to require the help of language engineers to process large quantities of biomedical and molecular biology literature (such as PubMed), patient data or health records. Linking the contents of these documents to each other, as well as to specialized ontologies, could enable access to and discovery of structured clinical information and foster a major leap in natural language processing and health research.

MEDA-2017 aims to gather innovative approaches for the exploitation of biomedical data. The workshop will bring together practitioners, researchers, and scholars to share examples, use cases, theories and analysis of biomedical data.

MEDA-2017 Workshop is part of EUROLAN-2017 Summer School (the 13th in the series of EUROLAN schools), which will provide a comprehensive overview of Biomedical Text Processing. We encourage students and young researchers, willing to present their work in MEDA-2017, and whose subject of interest departure from pure textual biomedical data, to attend the School’s tutorials, where they could find surprising information that could fit their own research. Often, solutions to our problems come from unexpected fields. The larger the scientific culture – the bigger the chance for an innovative solution.

Topics
We invite submissions, which may include, but are not restricted, to the following topics:
• mining biomedical literature
• event-based text mining for biology and related fields
• event extraction in medical texts
• entity identification and normalization
• conceptual graphs extracted from medical texts
• annotation of semantic content, with applications in medicine and biology
• textual big data techniques
• medical search engines
• health information technologies meet language technologies
• deep learning for bioinformatics
• biomedical question/answering
• Clinical data repositories / Big Data and Cloud Computing
• clinical relationships
• medical topic modeling
• medical language systems
• clinical text analysis
• text summarization in the biomedical domain

Submission
As one of the main goals of MEDA-2017 Workshop is to polish the students’ and young researchers’ abilities as future specialists in Biomedical Data, through feedback received from competent scientists, we accept and even encourage presentation of work in progress.
The paper should briefly and clearly state:
• the problem that the proposed research is addressing;
• the main contribution(s) of the research to the BioData or BioNLP field, differences and departures from the state of the art;
• the methodology of research, proposed solution(s), results, (open) linguistic resources and/or software offered to the scientific community and comparisons;
• future research plan.

We invite both long (8 pages) and short (4 pages) papers, representing original research, innovative approaches and resource types, use cases or in-depth discussions. Short papers may also represent project proposals or work in progress.
Submissions must be electronic, in .pdf format and (if applicable) as databases and/or open software. Papers should adopt the Springer LNCS format (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). Papers submitted to other conferences or journals must state this fact. If a paper has appeared already at the time of the Workshop in another conference or journal, it must be withdrawn from MEDA-2017.
Papers must be submitted online through EasyChair system following the submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=meda2017

For contact information, submission details and last-minute updates, please consult our website under http://eurolan.info.uaic.ro/2017/details.html#workshop.

Proceedings
All accepted papers should be presented at MEDA-2017 and will appear in a dedicated proceeding, in both printed and electronic version.

Registration
We encourage simultaneous participation in both MEDA-2017 Workshop and the EUROLAN Summer School, hence we intend to have only one registration fee, allowing access to both events. For details, visit http://eurolan.info.uaic.ro/2017/information.html.

Date and Venue
The MEDA-2017 Workshop will be held Thursday, 14 September 2017, in Constanța, Romania. MEDA-2017 will be a satellite event of EUROLAN-2017, the Summer School on Biomedical Text Processing, an event that will last between 10 and 17 September 2017.
In addition to the excellence of its academic program, the EUROLAN sequence of summer schools is well known for the camaraderie among professors and students, who may enjoy common activities and social events during dinners and later in the evenings, as well as an excursion in the middle of the school.
Constanța, the fifth largest city of Romania, with its wonderful port is an important touristic attraction, placed in the Dobruja region of Romania, on the Black Sea coast. More details about our venue can be found on http://eurolan.info.uaic.ro/2017/information.html#venue.

Important Dates
10 August 2017 - paper submission
17 August 2017 - notification of accepted papers
18 August 2017 - early registration deadline
28 August 2017 - final papers due
8 September 2017 - final (late) registration deadline

Program Committee
Elena Băutu – Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, “Ovidius” University Constanța
Dan Cristea – Faculty of Computer Science, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași and Institute of Computer Science, Romanian Academy
Irina Dumitru – Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, “Ovidius” University Constanța
Daniela Gîfu – Faculty of Computer Science, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași and Institute of Computer Science, Romanian Academy
Ionut Poinareanu – Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, “Ovidius” University Constanța
Dorin-Mircea Popovici – Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, “Ovidius” University Constanța
Crenguta-Madalina Puchianu – Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, “Ovidius” University Constanța
Dragos Sburlan – Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, “Ovidius” University Constanța
Diana Trandabăț – Faculty of Computer Science, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania
Dan Tufiș – Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Romanian Academy
Organizing Committee
Dan Cristea – Faculty of Computer Science, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași and Institute of Computer Science, Romanian Academy
Daniela Gîfu – Faculty of Computer Science, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași and Institute of Computer Science, Romanian Academy
Maria Mitrofan – Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Romanian Academy
Diana Trandabăț – Faculty of Computer Science, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași

Contact
diana.trandabat@gmail.com
daniela.gifu33@gmail.com