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3rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ALGORITHMS FOR COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY

AlCoB 2016

Trujillo, Spain

June 21-22, 2016

Organized by:

Computer Architecture and Logic Design Group (ARCO)
University of Extremadura

Extremadura Centre for Advanced Technologies (CETA-CIEMAT)

Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University

http://grammars.grlmc.com/alcob2016/
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AIMS:

AlCoB aims at promoting and displaying excellent research using string and graph algorithms and combinatorial optimization to deal with problems in biological sequence analysis, genome rearrangement, evolutionary trees, and structure prediction.

Previous events were held in Tarragona (2014) and Mexico City (2015).

The conference will address several of the current challenges in computational biology by investigating algorithms aimed at:
1) assembling sequence reads into a complete genome,
2) identifying gene structures in the genome,
3) recognizing regulatory motifs,
4) aligning nucleotides and comparing genomes,
5) reconstructing regulatory networks of genes, and
6) inferring the evolutionary phylogeny of species.

Particular focus will be put on methodology and significant room will be reserved to young scholars at the beginning of their career.

VENUE:

AlCoB 2016 will take place in Trujillo, homeland of the so-called "conquistadores" who arrived in Peru in the XVI century. The venue will be the Extremadura Centre for Advanced Technologies.

SCOPE:

Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:

Exact sequence analysis
Approximate sequence analysis
Pairwise sequence alignment
Multiple sequence alignment
Sequence assembly
Genome rearrangement
Regulatory motif finding
Phylogeny reconstruction
Phylogeny comparison
Structure prediction
Compressive genomics
Proteomics: molecular pathways, interaction networks
Transcriptomics: splicing variants, isoform inference and quantification, differential analysis
Next-generation sequencing: population genomics, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics
Microbiome analysis
Systems biology

STRUCTURE:

AlCoB 2016 will consist of:

invited lectures
invited tutorials
peer-reviewed contributions

INVITED SPEAKERS:

Evan Eichler (University of Washington, Seattle), De Novo Genome Assembly and Structural Variation
S. Cenk Sahinalp (Simon Fraser University), Big Data Algorithmics for Cancer Genomics
David Sankoff (University of Ottawa), The Evolution of Gene Order in the Flowering Plants

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Can Alkan (Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey)
Timothy L. Bailey (University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia)
Vladimir Bajic (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia)
Geoff Barton (University of Dundee, UK)
Inanc Birol (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Jacek Błażewicz (Poznań University of Technology, Poland)
Alan P. Boyle (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA)
Vladimir Brusic (Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan)
Liming Cai (University of Georgia, Athens, USA)
Rita Casadio (University of Bologna, Italy)
Ken Chen (University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, USA)
Jason Ernst (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
Laurent Gautier (Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Cambridge, USA)
Manolo Gouy (Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, France)
Michael Gribskov (Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA)
Iman Hajirasouliha (Stanford University, USA)
John Hancock (Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich, UK)
Artemis Hatzigeorgiou (University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece)
Fereydoun Hormozdiari (University of California, Davis, USA)
Kazutaka Katoh (Osaka University, Japan)
Evangelos Kranakis (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada)
Lukasz Kurgan (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Bill Majoros (Duke University, Durham, USA)
Lennart Martens (Ghent University, Belgium)
Maria‐Jesus Martin (European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK)
Carlos Martín‐Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain, chair)
Folker Meyer (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
Kenta Nakai (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Matteo Pellegrini (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
Mihaela Pertea (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA)
Ben Raphael (Brown University, Providence, USA)
Paolo Ribeca (Pirbright Institute, Woking, UK)
Denis Shields (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Fredj Tekaia (Pasteur Institute, Paris, France)
Alessandro Verri (University of Genova, Italy)
Fuli Yu (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA)
Daniel Zerbino (European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK)
Kaizhong Zhang (University of Western Ontario, London, Canada)
Weixiong Zhang (Washington University in St. Louis, USA)
Zhongming Zhao (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA)
Yaoqi Zhou (Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

María Botón-Fernández (Trujillo, co-chair)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)
Miguel A. Vega-Rodríguez (Cáceres, co-chair)
Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)

LOCAL COMMITTEE:

Leslye Alarcón (Trujillo)
María Botón-Fernández (Trujillo, co-chair)
José M. Granado-Criado (Cáceres)
Sergio Santander-Jiménez (Cáceres)
Miguel A. Vega-Rodríguez (Cáceres, co-chair)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit non-anonymized papers in English presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (including eventual appendices, references, proofs, etc.) and should be prepared according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Submissions have to be uploaded to:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=alcob2016

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS/LNBI series will be available by the time of the conference.

A special issue of the journal IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB, 2014 JCR impact factor: 1.438, quartile Q1) will be later published containing peer‐reviewed substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration is open from October 30, 2015 to June 21, 2016. The registration form can be found at:

http://grammars.grlmc.com/alcob2016/Registration.php

DEADLINES:

Paper submission: February 2, 2016 (extended deadline, 23:59 CET)
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: March 1, 2016
Final version of the paper for the LNCS/LNBI proceedings: March 15, 2016
Early registration: March 15, 2016
Late registration: June 7, 2016
Submission to the journal special issue: September 23, 2016

QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

florentinalilica.voicu (at) urv.cat

POSTAL ADDRESS:

AlCoB 2016
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Av. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona, Spain

Phone: +34 977 559 543
Fax: +34 977 558 386

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Centro Extremeño de Tecnologías Avanzadas (CETA-CIEMAT)
Universidad de Extremadura
Universitat Rovira i Virgili