NETTAB 2011 Call for Papers

NETTAB 2011 is the eleventh in a series of international workshops on Network Tools and Applications in Biology
NETTAB workshops are aimed at presenting and discussing emerging ICT technologies whose adoption in support of biology could be of particular interest. Since 2001, many different topics were discussed, including:

Clinical Bioinformatics, which is focused specifically on applications of bioinformatics innovations within a clinical context, encompasses nearly all areas of biomedical, and clinical research and is characterized by the challenge of integrating molecular and clinical data to accelerate the translation of knowledge discovery to effective treatment as well as customized disease - management and prevention.

Clinical bioinformatics is part of the larger field of translational bioinformatics, which has been defined by the American Medical Informatics Association as the development of storage, analytic, and interpretative methods to optimize the transformation of increasingly voluminous biomedical data - genomic data in particular - into proactive, predictive, preventive, and participatory health management.

In the last few years, new genome sequencing and other high-throughput experimental techniques have generated vast amounts of molecular and clinical data that contain crucial information with the potential of leading to the next major biomedical discoveries. In addition to the scientific challenges, the dimensionality and amount of genomic data sets shows new statistical and technical challenges, like gaining access to the computational power needed to test even simple translational hypotheses using genomic data.

Nowadays, one of the most innovative forces in translational bioinformatics is the public availability of molecular data, which can be used to enable new questions in applied sciences. Public data repositories such as the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), EBI's ArrayExpress enable researchers to face new central translational questions, for example concerning the way to find genes most likely to be up-regulated specifically in cancers rather than in all other human diseases. The high-throughput molecular measurements accessibility brings us closer to fully understand the nature of disease itself and will be able to create novel diagnostics and to discover fundamental causes of disease as targets for therapies.

Moreover, the increasing online availability of the 'bibliome', i.e. the biomedical text corpus, made through published manuscripts, abstracts, textual comments and reports, as well as direct-to-web publications, has stimulated the development of new algorithms able to semi-automatically extract knowledge so as to make it available in computable formats. Such algorithms combine the information reported in the text with that contained in biological knowledge repositories and are increasingly used for hypothesis generation or corroboration of clinical findings.

The consistent growth of publicly available data and knowledge sources and the possibility to easily access low-cost, high-throughput molecular technologies has meant that computational technologies and bioinformatics are increasingly central in genomic medicine; cloud computing technology is being recognised as a key technology for the future of genomic research to facilitate large-scale translational research in genomic medicine.

The current major opportunities for clinical bioinformatics are the evolving need to share molecular data and tools and the increasing expectation that clinicians should be able to synthesize and interpret new discoveries in molecular medicine for their patients' benefit; these perspectives require computational advances in order to fill the gaps between genetics discoveries and clinical practice, as well as infrastructures that enable translational bioinformatics research.

NETTAB 2011 is aimed at presenting the methods, tools and infrastructures that are nowadays available in clinical bioinformatics and will also show some of the most interesting applications in this field.

The following list is not meant to be exclusive of any further topics as stated above.
Submitted contributions should address one or more of the following topics:

The following possible contributions are sought:

• Oral communications
• Posters
• Software demos

The following deadlines are still subject to changes.

• CLOSED: Oral communications submission
• NEW! Decisions announced: September 12, 2011
• NEW! September 16, 2011: Posters submission
• Decisions announced: September 20, 2011
• September 30, 2011: Early registration ends
• October 12-14, 2011: Tutorials and Workshop

Kindly follow the instructions carefully when preparing your contribution and submit your contribution through the EasyChair system at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nettab2011.

All contributions should follow the same format, as specified here:
font type: Times New Roman, font size: 12 pti, page size: A4, left and right margins: 2.0 cm, upper margin: 2.5 cm, lower margin: 2.0 cm.

The lenght of contributions for oral communications should be between 3 and 5 pages, including tables and figures.
They should include: Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion, References.
All contributions for oral communications will be evaluated by at least three referees.

The length of contributions for posters should be no more then 3 pages, including tables and figures.
They should include: Introduction, Methods, Results, References.
All posters will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance fot the workshop's topics only.

For any further information or clarification, please contact the organization by email at info@nettab.org.