ECCB 2006
This special issue of Bioinformatics contains the proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB), which was held from January 21st through 24th, 2007, in the Dan Eilat Hotel in Eilat, Israel. The meeting was originally scheduled for September, 2006, but was postponed because of geopolitical events beyond our control.This year ECCB was held jointly with the 10th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium, the annual meeting of the Israeli Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Meeting details are available on the conference website: www.eccb06.org.
The ECCB conference series is a primary international conference series in computational biology, alongside ISMB and RECOMB. The conference covers computational methods for molecular biology that arise in the context of genomics and proteomics technologies in the fields of molecular biology, molecular medicine and pharmaceuticals. Talks cover a broad range of topics, and the scope expands each year to incorporate advances in new biological applications of mathematics and computing.
ECCB is held in a different country or region each year, and incorporates the annual national or regional meeting where it is held. The inaugural meeting was in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 2002. Since then, the meeting has been held in Paris, France (2003), Glasgow, Scotland (2004) and Madrid, Spain (2005). The 2004 meeting was held jointly with ISMB, and another joint meeting is planned for July, 2007.
Our world in general, and our field in particular, increasingly uses electronic media. One innovation this year was distributing the primary version of the proceedings on CD, though printed copies were available. ISMB 2006 used a similar model. We expect that the search facilities on the CD will facilitate finding relevant papers and posters. The presentation format is still experimental and we look forward to improvements in the coming years.
The conference topics span computational methodologies, such as graph and combinatorial algorithms, pattern discovery and recognition, machine learning, probability and statistics, data mining, geometric computing and data visualization. These techniques are applied to biological problems in the fields of biological sequence analysis, protein structure and function, evolution and phylogenetics, proteomics, systems biology, drug design, transcriptomics, text mining in biological databases and more. We received 187 high-quality submissions. The manuscripts were reviewed by the members of the Program Committee, which accepted 36 (19%) manuscripts for frontal presentation. The accepted papers, which appear in this issue, are (very) roughly classified into the areas of computational and comparative genomics, biological sequence analysis, evolution and phylogenetics, molecular recognition, structural bioinformatics, proteomics, systems biology, text mining and machine learning in computational biology.
ECCB 2006 featured six distinguished keynote speakers: Naama Barkai (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel), Sir Tom Blundell (University of Cambridge, UK), Richard Karp (UC Berkeley, USA), Burkhard Rost (Columbia, USA), Jeffrey Skolnick (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and Martin Vingron (Max Planck Institute of Molecular Genetics, Germany).
Because the conference was postponed, a call for ‘Late-Breaking Results’ was issued. Of the 26 submitted extended abstracts, six were selected for 20 min frontal presentation and 19 were accepted as posters.
The conference program also included a variety of scientific presentations other than frontal lectures. The two full-day workshops were Distributed, High-Performance and Grid Computing in Computational Biology (GCCB 2006), chaired by Werner Dubitzky and Mathilde Romberg (University of Ulster); and Genome Annotation: a BioSapiens Network of Excellence Initiative, chaired by Nir Ben-Tal (Tel Aviv University).
Three half-day tutorials were presented: Strategies for Discovering and Interpreting Regulatory DNA Sequence Motifs, by Ernest Fraenkel (MIT); Gene and Protein Networks, by Debra Goldberg and Todd Gibson (University of Colorado); and Immunological Bioinformatics, by Morten Nielsen and Claus Lundegaard (Technical University of Denmark).
Other presentations included eighteen academic and commercial software demos, several commercial and non-commercial exhibits, and more than 200 posters. Poster abstracts appear on the conference CD.
A Program Committee of 42 distinguished researchers, assisted by more than 200 co-reviewers, refereed the submitted manuscripts. Each contribution was read by three members of the Program Committee. A subcommittee of nine researchers reviewed the ‘Late-Breaking Results’ extended abstracts, each contribution being refereed by two members of the committee. Communication with the Program Committee and full electronic handling of the submission and review procedures were performed using EasyChair, a free conference management system.
The Workshops and Tutorials Committee was chaired by Tal Pupko (Tel Aviv University), the Software Demo Committee was chaired by Eitan Rubin (Ben Gurion University), the Publications Committee was chaired by Ron Unger (Bar Ilan University), and the Poster Committee was chaired by Nir Ben-Tal (Tel Aviv University).
We thank all those who contributed to the success of this year's ECCB. The full list is too long to include here, but some individuals and organizations should be singled out. We especially thank all those who were supportive and helpful with regard to the conference postponement.
We thank all those who provided financial support for the conference; the full list of sponsors appears on the conference website. We particularly thank our Platinum Sponsor, a joint effort of Sun Microsystems and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
ECCB continued its tradition of affiliation with the International Society for Computational Biology. The EU has once again provided tremendous financial support, especially for student and postdoc travel fellowships, via the BioSapiens Network of Excellence: A European Virtual Institute for Genome Annotation, and the EMBRACE Network of Excellence: A European Model for Bioinformatics Research and Community Education. Also noteworthy among non-commercial financial sponsors is the Weizmann Institute of Science.
We thank the members of the Program Committee, Local Organizing Committee, LOC subcommittees, Steering Committee and ECCB Series Steering Committee for their advice and assistance. The Program Committee in particular reviewed a large number of submissions and selected a high-quality program in a short span of time, even while many of its members were also reviewing papers for ISMB.
We are grateful to Rhoda Frydman (Weizmann Institute of Science) for maintaining the website and providing administrative support; Keren Katzav (Weizmann Institute of Science) for her many contributions to the graphics, including designing the website and producing the program book; Maxim Shatsky (Tel Aviv University) for supporting the Program Committee in operating the EasyChair system; and Emma Westgate and the entire team at Oxford University Press for producing the electronic and printed proceedings. We thank Anat Reshef and her group at the Diesenhaus-Unitours Conventions Department for handling the logistics that helped make the conference a success. And special thanks to all the speakers, poster presenters and conference participants, who contributed to a tremendous meeting.
Haim Wolfson Conference co-chair & Program Committee chair Hershel Safer Conference co-chair & Local Organizing Committee chair
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