BILIS 2013 - International Workshop on High Performance Computing Systems for Bioinformatics and Life Sciences (BILIS 2013)

Incorporating new advancements of Information Technology (IT) in general and High Performance Computing (HPC) in particular in the domain of Life Sciences and Biomedical Research continues to receive tremendous attention of researchers, biomedical institutions and the rest of the biomedical community. Although medical instruments have benefited a great deal from the technological advances of the couple of decades, the impact of integrating IT advancements in addressing critical problems in biomedical research remains limited and the process of penetrating IT tools in the medical profession continues to be a very challenging problem. For example, the use of electronic medical records and Hospital Information Systems in improving health care remains fragmented. Similarly, the use of advanced computational tools seamlessly in the biomedical research cycle continues to be minimal.
Due to the computational intensive problems in life sciences, the marriage between the Bioinformatics domain and high performance computing is critical to the advancement of Biosciences. In addition, the problems in this domain tend to be highly parallelizable and deal with large datasets, hence using HPC is a natural fit. The Bioinformatics domain is rich in applications that require extracting useful information from very large and continuously growing sequence of databases. Most methods used for analyzing DNA/Protein sequences are known to be computationally intensive, providing motivation for the use of powerful computational systems with high throughput characteristics.
In the current Information age, further progress of Medical Sciences requires successful integration with Computational and Information Sciences. The workshop attempts to attract innovative ways of how such integration can be achieved via Bioinformatics and Biomedical Informatics research, particularly in taking advantage of the new advancements in HPC systems. The focus of data analysis and data mining tools in biomedical research highlights the current state of research in the key biomedical research areas such as bioinformatics, medical informatics and biomedical imaging. Addressing performance concerns in managing and accessing medical data, while facilitating the ability to integrate and correlate different biomedical databases remains an outstanding problem in biomedical research. The amount of available biomedical data continues to grow in an exponential rate; however, the impact of utilizing such resources remains minimal. The development of innovative tools in HPC environments to integrate, analyze and mine such data sources is a key step towards achieving large impact levels.
The workshop focuses on topics related to the utilization of HPC systems and new models of parallel computations in problems related to Biomedical Informatics, along with the use of data integration and data mining tools to support biomedical research and Health Care.
The Workshop topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
HPC for the Analysis of Biological Data
Bioinformatics Tools for Health Care
Parallel Algorithms for Bioinformatics Applications
Algorithms and Tools for Biomedical Imaging and Medical Signal Processing
Energy Aware Scheduling Techniques for Large Scale Biomedical Applications
HPC for analyzing Biological Networks
Next Generation Sequencing and Advanced Tools for DNA Assembly
HPC for Gene, Protein/RNA Analysis and Structure Prediction
Identification of Biomarkers
Biomedical Visualization Tools
Efficient Clustering and Classification Algorithms
Correlation Networks in Biomedical Research
Data Mining Techniques in Biomedical Applications
Heterogeneous Data Integration
HPC systems for Ontology and Database Integration
Pattern Recognition and Search Tools in Biological and Clinical Databases
Ubiquitous Medical Knowledge Discovery and Exchange
HPC for Monitoring and Treatment Facilities
Drug Design and Modeling
Computer Assisted Surgery and Medical Procedures
Remote Patient Monitoring, Homecare Applications
Mobile and Wireless Healthcare and Biomedical Applications