From Heather.Vincent from manchester.ac.uk Wed Sep 10 08:43:39 2008 From: Heather.Vincent from manchester.ac.uk (Heather Vincent) Date: Wed Sep 10 11:16:15 2008 Subject: [Bioforum] Distance courses in Bioinformatics - registration deadline Message-ID: <48C7CF0B.8050109@manchester.ac.uk> The next distance courses in Bioinformatics from the University of Manchester and the University of Leeds, UK, begin on 6 October 2008. The application deadline is Friday 19 September. These Masters level courses follow two themes, Bioinformatics and Computer Science. The Bioinformatics courses are: Introduction to Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists Introduction to Bioinformatics Bioinformatics for Systems Biology Introduction to Microarray Data Analysis Theory and Applications in Bioinformatics The Bioinformatics of Protein Structure The Science of Proteomics Molecular Modelling and Structure-based Drug Design The computing courses are: Introduction to software development in Java Intermediate Java Biocomputing Object-oriented analysis and design with UML Introduction to Ontologies for the Biosciences You will find further information, including fees and a link to the online application form, here : http://octette.cs.man.ac.uk/bioinformatics/index.html If you have any questions, or need advice on the module options, please contact Heather.Vincent@manchester.ac.uk From icdm08-publicity from isti.cnr.it Tue Sep 16 09:24:41 2008 From: icdm08-publicity from isti.cnr.it (Maurizio Atzori) Date: Tue Sep 16 16:12:31 2008 Subject: [Bioforum] IEEE ICDM'8 Data Mining Contest Message-ID: IEEE International Conference on Data Mining ICDM 2008 Data Mining Contest: Radioxenon monitoring for verification of the Comprehensive nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisers ---------- Kurt Ungar, Trevor Stocki and Jing Yi Health Canada Nathalie Japkowicz University of Ottawa Arno Siebes Universiteit Utrecht Website: http://www.cs.uu.nl/groups/ADA/icdm08cup/ The IEEE ICDM 2008 Data Mining Contest is, simply put, about keeping the world safe using data mining. This contest is about developing and testing data mining techniques to verify worldwide compliance of the global ban on nuclear tests. Such tests can be detected by measuring the amount of special xenon isotopes. Obviously, it's not just that simple; these isotopes are also emitted during various legal activities. Timeline for the Contest ------------------------ 1) September 12, 2008: Release of the Training Data and Test Data sets and the Software tools that will be used to evaluate the results. 2) October 22, 2008: Results from the labelled set are due. 3) November 8, 2008: Results obtained on the unlabeled data set are due 4) December 15-19: Results of the competition are announced at the conference. General Description of the Problem ----------------------------------- Compliance verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), when the treaty enters into force, will employ four remote sensing technologies to detect nuclear explosions. Only radionuclide detection can unequivocally establish that an explosion was due to a nuclear detonation. Radioactive noble gas (the following isotopes: Xe-131m, Xe-133m, Xe-133, and Xe-135) are sampled and measured in a procedure called radionuclide monitoring. Different relative combinations of these isotopes correspond to different signatures that can be mapped to distinct sources (such as nuclear power plants, medical isotope production facilities, or various types of weapons). The problem of attributing a specific observation of airborne concentrations of radioxenon to an explosion is twofold. Firstly, in the first few weeks after an explosion the relative concentrations of the four isotopes are expected to be released in ?fingerprint? relative concentrations quite distinct from other background sources. Since the CTBT stations are not located at the source of the explosion, the radioxenon is detected at a location which can be well over a thousand kilometres away. This atmospheric transport process can take weeks, which can increase the complexity of this signature. Secondly, one can never observe radioxenons emitted purely from an explosion source but admixtures of this gas with the radioxenons released from all background sources. These 2 points above constitute an interesting data mining problem for the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). Description of the dataset to be used ------------------------------------- Radioxenon measurements from four to five CTBTO monitoring sites will be provided. These will be comprised of a few hundred to a few thousand sets of observations of the four species for each site. A synthesized a set of explosion observations at these same sites will be added to actual radioxenon concentrations caused by background sources. The data sets are composed of two classes, Background (B), and Background plus Explosion (B+E). Each type has a set of quadruplets representing the four activity concentrations of Xe-131m, Xe-133m, Xe-133, and Xe-135 for a given air sample. We will be issuing labelled data sets containing both classes during the first phase of the competition, while teams develop a classification method appropriate for this task. In a second phase, we will issue a new data set also containing data from both classes, but we will withhold the label. This testing data set will be used for our final evaluation. Description of the computational tasks -------------------------------------- Two versions of data sets will be provided. The first will have each datum described according to station of origin, a unique randomly assigned tracking number allowing the contest evaluators trace the datum back to the original scenario of explosion release, whether it is Background or whether it is Background plus Explosion. The second version will have each datum described by station of origin using the same stations as the first data set and a unique randomly assigned tracking number allowing the contest evaluators trace the datum back to the original scenario of explosion release. The second set of data will contain cases of B or B+E but this will be unknown to the contestants. The first version of the data will be employed in Tasks 1 and 2. The final version of the data will be employed in Task 3. Task 1: The first task is to classify as accurately as possible the results as Background or Explosion over the entire set of stations provide with one classifier. Contestants may combine data as they see fit. They may separately tune classifier parameters for each station but they may not have separate classifier parameter types for each station nor separate classifiers. Contestants can to report on more than one classifier for this task. Task 2: In the second task, conversely, the contestant is requested to identify an optimal algorithm for each station given. Task 3 In the third task, the contestants will apply the classifiers developed in Tasks 1 and 2 using the second data set and report their results for evaluation. The primary goal of this contest is to produce methods that are broadly applicable over different station background measurement distributions and explosion source hypotheses. The best methods will also have a very efficient learning curve. Recognition will also be given to methods more proficient in properly categorizing data arising from specific classes of explosion release hypotheses or station background types, because these methods add a forensic or diagnostic dimension. From evostar from na.icar.cnr.it Thu Sep 18 09:03:39 2008 From: evostar from na.icar.cnr.it (Evostar 2009) Date: Thu Sep 18 11:57:20 2008 Subject: [Bioforum] Evostar 2009 - third Call for Papers Message-ID: <48D25FBB.9050700@na.icar.cnr.it> * Our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement * --------------------------------------------------------------- THIRD CALL FOR PAPERS --------------------------------------------------------------- EVO* 2009 including EuroGP, EvoCOP, EvoBIO and EvoWorkshops 15-17 April, 2009 Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany http://www.evostar.org --------------------------------------------------------------- The EuroGP, EvoCOP and EvoBIO conferences and the workshops collectively entitled EvoWorkshops compose EVO*: Europe's premier co-located events in the field of Evolutionary Computing. Featuring the latest in theoretical and applied research, EVO* topics include recent genetic programming challenges, evolutionary and other meta-heuristic approaches for combinatorial optimization, evolutionary algorithms, machine learning and data mining techniques in the biosciences, in numerical optimization, in music and art domains, in image analysis and signal processing, in hardware optimization and in a wide range of applications to scientific, industrial, financial and other real-world problems. EuroGP: Twelfth European Conference on Genetic Programming: high quality papers are sought on topics strongly related to the evolution of computer programs, ranging from theoretical work to innovative applications. EvoCOP: Ninth European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization: practical and theoretical contributions are invited, related to evolutionary computation techniques and other meta-heuristics for solving combinatorial optimization problems. EvoBIO: Seventh European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics: the emphasis is on evolutionary computation and other advanced techniques addressing important problems in molecular biology, proteomics, genomics and genetics, that have been implemented and tested in simulations and on real-life datasets. EvoWorkshops: The twelve workshops which make up this event are focused on the use of Evolutionary Computation in different application areas: EvoCOMNET: Telecommunication networks and other parallel and distributed systems EvoENVIRONMENT: Environmental issues EvoFIN: Finance and economics EvoGAMES: Games EvoHOT: Design automation EvoIASP: Image analysis and signal processing EvoINTERACTION: Interactive evolution and humanized computational intelligence EvoMUSART: Music, sound, art and design EvoNUM: Continuous parameter optimization EvoPHD: Graduate student workshop on evolutionary computation EvoSTOC: Stochastic and dynamic environments (EvoSTOC has organized the “yellow submarine challenge” competition for dynamic optimization, further information can be found in the workshop page) EvoTRANSLOG: Transportation and logistics In 2009, the event will take place in Tübingen, a traditional university town in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, situated on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers in the southwest of the country, about 30 kms southwest of Stuttgart. EVO* 2009 will be hosted at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, founded in 1477 and one of the oldest universities in Germany. Important Dates for all events are: *** Submission deadline: 5 November 2008 *** Notification to authors: 9 January 2009 Camera-ready deadline: 21 January 2009 Conference: 15-17 April 2009 Evo* 2009 proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The website http://www.evostar.org offers information relevant to all events, including calls for papers, deadlines, organizing committees, submission requirements, local information and a thorough view on the previous editions.