ICIW 2013 - Fourth Immunoinformatics and Computational Immunology Workshop (ICIW 2013)

Technical advances in instrumentation, sample processing, immunological assays, and bioinformatics techniques generated large amount of immunological data. The overwhelming quantities and complexity of these data present a challenge for immunologists trying to interpret results, extract useful information, and derive new knowledge. The main role of immunoinformatics and computational immunology computational immunology is to convert immunological data into computational problems, solve these problems using mathematical and computational approaches, and then interpret the results to answer immunologically meaningful questions and advance our understanding of the immune system.
The main theme of this workshop is "Bridging Immunology and Computer Science". Nowadays computational methods are integral to virtually every research and development project in every discipline. Immunology is not an exception and the need for sophisticated computational methods for research and development in immunology is increasing. At the same time, because of the extreme domain complexity of immunology, the lag between availability of sophisticated computational methods and their implementation in this field is increasing. There is ever growing need of computational methods for developing new vaccines and cancer immunotherapy and improving our knowledge and understanding of the immune system. Complementing laboratory experiments, computer approaches speed up knowledge discovery in immunology.
Description of workshop topic and the associated research issues
The ICIW 2013 invites submission of original papers describing previously unpublished research and development on recent advances in the field of immunoinformatics and computational immunology. All papers will be peer-reviewed. All accepted papers will be included in the proceedings published by ACM digital libraries. The authors of several selected papers will present their work to participants of the workshop and the conference. Selected papers will be invited to adapt their papers for publication in journals including Immunome Research and Journal of Immunological Methods. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Structural immunoinformatics
Epitope analysis and prediction
MHC-peptide binding site analysis and prediction
Immunoinformatics databases, Knowledge bases, Ontologies
Computational modeling of immune system
Analysis and prediction of minor histocompatibility antigens
Predictive models for organ transplantation
Immunogenomics
Immunomics
Vaccine design
Artificial immune systems and other biologically-inspired paradigms
Multi-agent based modeling of immune response
Allergenicity prediction
Gene expression changes in adaptive immune response
Comparative approaches to immunology