Bioinformatics Events at SAC2001

16th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC2001)
Las Vegas
March 11-14, 2001

SAC 2001 BIOINFORMATICS TRACK DESCRIPTION

The explosion of data generated by recent developments in molecular biology and genomics has produced computational challenges which represent collaborative research opportunities for computer scientists. These challenges may be broadly characterized into three areas:

Storage, e.g., creation and maintenance of DNA sequence / protein structure / metabolic activity databases, automated annotation of database entries, integration of / access to information stored in groups of databases.
Analysis, e.g., prediction of gene position / composition from raw sequence, prediction of 3-D structures from coding sequences, derivation of common patterns from groups of sequences / structures, inference of evolutionary trees, inference of metabolic / regulatory networks from experimental data and subsequent analysis of the behavior of these networks.
Visualization, e.g., software tools for visualizing and manipulating representations of genome-associated structures (sequences / metabolic networks / evolutionary trees) that are stored in a single database or reconstructed from the information in a group of databases.

The primary aim of this track is to showcase papers that address these challenges relative to a variety of problems and techniques.

EVENTS SCHEDULE

There are two sessions consisting of five papers in the SAC2001 bioinformatics track. Also, as this is the first SAC research paper track on bioinformatics, there will be a series of associated events sponsored by ACM SIGBIO (Special Interest Group on Biomedical Computing) that are designed to help computer scientists initiate research collaborations in bioinformatics.

Sunday, March 11:
- 1:30 - 4:30 PM:
  Tutorial: Introduction to Bioinformatics
  Michael Hallett (McGill Centre for Bioinformatics, School of Computer Science, McGill University)
Monday, March 12:
- 8:30 - 10:00 AM:
  Keynote Address
  Gene Myers (Vice President of Informatics Research, Celera Genomics)
- 10:30 AM - Noon:
  Session: Bioinformatics I
  (Session Chair: Peter Tolias, New Jersey Medical School)
  - Computational Structural Genomics: Finding Protein Targets for Structural Studies
    Igor .V. Grigoriev and Sung-Huo. Kim (UC Berkeley)
  - Perfect Phylogenetic Networks with Recombination
    Lusheng Wang (City University of Hong Kong), Kaizhong Zhang (University of Western Ontario), and Louxin Zhang (National University of Singapore)
  - Identifying the Most Significant Pairwise Correlation of Residues in Different Positions of Helices: The Subset Selection Problem Using Least Squares Optimization
    Xianghong Zhou, Gaston H. Gonnet (ETH Zurich), Michael Hallett (McGill University), Gareth Chelvanayagam (University of Western Australia), and Gerd Folkers (ETH Zurich)
- 1:30 - 3:00 PM:
  Session: Bioinformatics II
  (Session Chair: Roman Osman, Mount Sinai School of Medicine)
  - An Approximation Algorithm for the Shortest Common Supersequence Problem: An Experimental Analysis
    Paolo Barone, Paola Bonizzoni, Gianluca Della Vedova, and Giancarlo Mauri (Universita degli Studi di Milano)
  - Picking Fruit from the Tree of Life: Comments on Taxonomic Sampling and Quartet Methods
    Jonathan H. Badger and Paul Kearney (University of Waterloo)
- 3:30 - 5:00 PM
  Bioinformatics Curricula Panel
  - Panel Chair: Michael Recce (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
  - Panel Members: Daniel Davison (Bristol-Myers Squibb), Warren Jones (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Paul Kearney (University of Waterloo), John Salerno (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), and Peter Tolias (New Jersey Medical School)

BIOINFORMATICS RESOURCE LINKS

TRACK ORGANIZERS

Chair:	Co-Chair:
Warren T. Jones	Todd Wareham
Department of Computer and Information Sciences	Department of Computer Science
University of Alabama at Birmingham	Memorial University of Newfoundland
Birmingham, AL	St. John's, NF
USA 35294-1170	Canada A1B 3X5
Email: jones@cis.uab.edu	Email: harold@cs.mun.ca
Phone: (205) 934-8657	Phone: (709) 737-7511
FAX: (205) 934-5473	FAX: (709) 737-2009

Created: February 13, 2001
Last Modified: February 19, 2001