CBMS 2012 - 5th Special Track Grid and Cloud Computing in Biomedicine and Life Sciences

25th IEEE International Symposium on
COMPUTER-BASED MEDICAL SYSTEMS
June 20-22,
Universita' Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Italy
5th Special Track
Grid and Cloud Computing in Biomedicine and Life Sciences
http://datadog.unile.it/cbms2012/
CALL FOR PAPERS
Life sciences researchers routinely deal with large data to be analyzed by applications that need considerable computing power, including advanced parallel and distributed infrastructures, such as grids/clouds, clusters, and many-cores, multi-cores and FPGA architectures. Managing these data and optimizing the applications for these architectures is one of the challenges that must be tackled.
High-throughput techniques for DNA sequencing, gene expression analysis, healthcare data analysis, etc., have led to an exponential increase in the volume of biological data, which in turn are geographically spread in several laboratories and data repositories.
Other questions, such as climate change impact on the life sciences, and the disciplines to address them, are adding to the deluge of data: many prevalent human diseases are linked to climate fluctuations, from heat stress, cardiovascular mortality and respiratory illnesses due to heat waves, to altered transmission of infectious diseases and malnutrition connected to crop failures.
Bringing together and correlating data among different and heterogeneous data sources will allow inference of new knowledge from these databases. There is a tremendous potential for end-users in many fields of life sciences, to routinely conduct large scale computations on distributed resources by using a combination of the following technologies:
- Distributed middleware for connecting data/cluster computing centers: this includes grid computing middleware for users' authentication and accounting, remote job submission, resource scheduling/reservation, and data management;
- Virtualization technologies capable of providing on demand application-specific execution environments: this involves a style of computing, cloud computing, in which on-demand resources are provided as a service over the Internet.
Grid for the Life Sciences is an environment that allows sharing of resources, in which heterogeneous and dispersed health data as well as applications can be accessed by all users as a tailored information providing system according to their authorization.
Cloud computing is emerging as a model for enabling convenient, on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Institutions and medical professionals who frequently do not have enough storage and computing resources can manage their biomedical information through applications built on top of these types of services, accessing advanced computing infrastructures that they could not afford otherwise. While many companies, like Google, IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft, were early adopters of cloud computing, its application to biomedicine has been only recently proposed, mainly for bioinformatics applications. Several reviews and research papers have reported on these, while in contrast, applications in medical informatics have been infrequent. Now, medical applications are increasingly proposed and implemented, though reports are still scarce from a research and academic perspective.
The main goal of the track is to exchange ideas and results related to on going grid and cloud computing research in Biomedicine, Life Sciences and correlated disciplines, such as Climate Change, that impact on human health, focusing on different aspects of middleware, technologies and applications.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
The topics of interest will include but will be not limited to:
o Grid/cloud infrastructures, middleware and tools;
o Grid/cloud applications: service and/or algorithm design and implementation; best practices related to solving large-scale problems on grid/cloud infrastructures;
o Parallel algorithms using MPI or OpenMP;
o Exploiting modern parallel architectures including FPGA, many-cores and multi-cores for parallel applications;
o GPGPU parallel algorithms using OpenCL or CUDA;
o Security and privacy preserving in grids/clouds;
o Innovative approaches for the exploration, storage, processing, delivery and/or visualization of biomedical information;
o Workflow Management Systems;
o Scientific gateways and user environments;
o Inferring new knowledge from databases by using data and text Mining methodologies and techniques;
o Web services and cloud computing for biomedical applications: comparative studies;
o Using biomedical ontologies for advanced cloud computing-based biomedical applications: requirements, experiences, limitations;
o Real cases, testbeds and international projects facing
(a) Biomedicine, bioinformatics and healthcare;
(b) Climate change models and health challenges, etc.;
(c) Applications for developing countries.
PAPER SUBMISSION
Papers should be submitted electronically using EasyChair online submission system. The papers must be prepared following the IEEE two-column format and should not exceed the length of 6 (six) Letter-sized pages. LaTeX or Microsoft Word templates can be used when preparing the papers. Please, note that only PDF format of submissions is allowed.
Submission through EasyChair requires that an account in the system be created by a prospective author first. In order to create a new account, select the "I have no EasyChair account" option and follow the instructions given. When submitting, please, select the "Grid and Cloud Computing in Biomedicine and Life Sciences" special track.
JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE
After the workshop, selected papers may be invited for a special issue of an international journal or for an edited book. Selected papers (extended and revised versions) accepted on the previous editions of the workshop have been published on a special section of Briefings in Bioinformatics (Oxford University Press).
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission due January 15, 2012
Notification of acceptance March 15, 2012
Final camera-ready paper due April 10, 2012
Pre-registration deadline April 10, 2012
CBMS symposium days June 20-22 2012
TRACK CO-CHAIRS:
* Giovanni Aloisio (University of Salento & CMCC, Lecce, Italy)
* Maria Mirto (University of Salento & CMCC, Lecce, Italy)
* Victor Maojo (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain)
* Casimir A. Kulikowski (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA)
* Tony Solomonides, Vice-President, HealthGrid, UK
* Alfredo Tirado-Ramos, Emory University, Atlanta, USA
PROGRAM COMMITTEE (PROVISIONAL)
* Vincent Breton (CNRS/IN2P3, LPC Clermont-Ferrand, France)
* Marian Bubak (AGH Krakow PL/ UvA Amsterdam NL)
* Massimo Cafaro (University of Salento, Lecce, Italy)
* Mario Cannataro (University "Magna Gr?cia" of Catanzaro, Italy)
* Henri Casanova (University of Hawaii, USA)
* Ewa Deelman (ISI/USC, USA)
* Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee, USA)
* Geoffrey Fox (Indiana University, USA)
* Vicente Hernandez (Universidad Politecnica de Valencia)
* Dieter Kranzlmueller (Ludwing-Maximilian University Munich & Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Germany)
* Mary Kratz (University of Michigan Medical School Information Services, USA)
* Yannick Legre (MaatG / HealthGrid)
* David Manset (University of Savoie, France, University West of England, UK, Maat G knowledge, Madrid, Spain)
* Johan Montagnat (CNRS (I3S laboratory) France)
* Silvia D. Olabarriaga (Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
* Ashish Sharma (Emory University, Atlanta, USA)
* Bruno Schulze, National Laboratory for Scientific Computing - LNCC, Brasil
* Jonathan Silverstein (Computation Institute of the University of Chicago, USA)
* Richard Sinnott (National e-Science Centre, Glasgow, UK)
* Albert Zomaya (University of Sydney, Australia)