================================================================ SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS *** deadline extension: June 11 *** WCB07 Workshop on Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics http://www.bioinf.uni-freiburg.de/Events/WCB07 Workshop at ICLP07 September 8-13, 2007 Porto, Portugal ================================================================= ----------------------------------------------------------------- Description ----------------------------------------------------------------- Bioinformatics is a recent discipline that has already captured the interests of many researchers. This wide and fast evolving field of research suggests new complex challenges to computer science. The applications of new achievements can be beneficial to medicine, agriculture, and/or industry. To pick out only a few examples, Bioinformatics tackles problems related to: * Recognition, analysis, and organization of DNA sequences * Biological systems simulations (for metabolic or regulatory networks) * Prediction of the spatial conformation of a biological poly- mer, given its sequence of monomers (in particular for proteins and RNA) All these problems can be naturally formalized using constraints over finite domains or intervals of reals. Biology is a source of extremely interesting and challenging problems that can be encoded exploiting the application of recent and more general techniques of constraint programming. In this framework, some problems that have been successfully tackled are: * The fundamental bioinformatics problem of sequence alignment can be solved by recent inference based constraint methods * Biological systems simulations can be easily designed using concurrent constraint programming, and * The constrained-based prediction of protein conformations promoted the development of new search strategies, new constraint solvers, and general symmetry breaking. The main aim of this workshop is twofold. On the one hand, to share recent results in this area (new constraint solving techniques, new prediction and simulation programs). On the other hand, to present new challenging problems formalized and/or solved with constraint based methods. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Important Dates ----------------------------------------------------------------- Submission Deadline: June 11 Notification to Authors: July 6 Camera-ready copy due: July 22 Workshop: September 13 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Program Committee ----------------------------------------------------------------- Rolf Backofen (co-chair) Freiburg Univ., Germany Pedro Barahona Univ. Nova de Lisbona, Portugal Alexander Bockmayr Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany Mats Carlsson SICS, Uppsala, Sweden Alessandro Dal Palu' (co-chair) Parma Univ., Italy David Gilbert University of Glasgow Simon De Givry INRA, Toulouse, France Agostino Dovier Udine Univ., Italy Francois Fages INRIA Rocquencourt, France Enrico Pontelli New Mexico State Univ., USA Sebastian Will (co-chair) Freiburg Univ., Germany ----------------------------------------------------------------- Submission Details ----------------------------------------------------------------- Submitted papers can be * Summaries of already accepted or recently published results * Extended Abstracts of new results or * Abstract of ongoing works in any topic concerning bioinformatics and constraints. Submission style is the standard llncs style. Page limit is 6 pages. Please send the pdf or ps to wcb07 at informatik.uni-freiburg.de ----------------------------------------------------------------- Participation ----------------------------------------------------------------- At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop. All workshop participants must pay the workshop fee according to CP rules. -----------------------------------------------------------------