2004 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB 2004)

A successful CIBCB 2004 symposium was held in La Jolla, California at the Radisson Hotel La Jolla, October 7th and 8th 2004. The event was officially opened on Thursday morning at 8:40 a.m. with a keynote lecture “Why the Computer Scientist Should Think Like an Evolutionist” given by pioneering bioinformatician Russell Doolittle. A key take-home lesson from that lecture was that our use of computers for answering bioinformatics questions should not be without an understanding of and appreciation for the process of evolution during results interpretation.

Following Russ Doolittle’s lecture, a single-track of oral presentations began, with emphasis in the use of computational intelligence methods for such topics as gene expression analysis, prediction and classification problems in DNA and protein sequence information, clustering, and structure prediction. Each single-track set of oral presentations began at 10:00 a.m. and ended roughly at 5:20 p.m. on both Thursday and Friday. The symposium was closed at 6:00 p.m. on Friday with a review of IEEE CIS by CIS President Jacek Zurada, brief words by David Fogel on IEEE publications including the new IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and concluding with awards for best student paper and best overall paper, a synopsis of the event, and group photo organized by Gary Fogel (General Chair). The symposium was sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) and organized by members of the IEEE CIS Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee (BBTC).

CIBCB aims to bring together researchers from around the world to discuss applications of computational intelligence in bioinformatics. Following each presentation, there was typically a good exchange of ideas and comments, which hopefully will lead to additional research and presentation at CIBCB 2005. CIBCB 2004 had 53 registered attendees from 14 different countries. 40% of these registrants were students. The 39 accepted manuscripts contained 130 total authors from 22 different countries, which suggests that CIBCB succeeded in meeting its aims! All paper submissions were handled electronically using the wonderful web system generated by Tomasz Cholewo. This same web system was used for reviews and making final decisions of acceptance.

CIBCB 2004 also provided the opportunity for the IEEE CIS BBTC to hold its first meeting, to discuss the future of CIBCB conference and the importance of computational intelligence methods in bioinformatics. We were pleased to have Jacek Zurada and IEEE CIS VP of Technical Activities and IEEE CIS conneCtIonS Editor par excellance Gary Yen in attendance for this inaugural meeting. The BBTC looks forward to a series of successful future bioinformatics events and growing participation. Special thanks go to David Corne (Technical Chair and CIBCB web site designer), Gwenn Volkert (Proceedings Chair), Garrison Greenwood (Publicity Chair), and David Fogel (Finance Chair) for their work in generating a successful CIBCB 2004 event.

Next year, CIBCB 2005 will also be held in San Diego on November 14th and 15th. Papers will be due by July 31, 2005 and we expect to maintain the single-track session format. We look forward to seeing you in sunny San Diego!

Gary Fogel, General Chair