Student Support for the 8th Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM BCB 2017)

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The 8th ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Health Informatics (ACMBCB2017) is the flagship conference of the ACM SIGBio (Special Interest Group in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics) to be held in Boston, MA, August 20-23, 2017. It is the premier dissemination forum for interdisciplinary research linking computer science, mathematics, statistics, biology, bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, and health informatics. Its mission is to support advanced research, training, and outreach. It brings together leading researchers, practitioners, and students around the world to promote novel scientific findings in bioscience and to deliver new knowledge for societal impact. The past few decades have seen tremendous growth in the scale and complexity of biological and medical data including recent mainstream recognition of big data challenges. However, the development of synergy in bioinformatics, computational biology, and biomedical informatics research has been difficult. Thus, it is important to cultivate the new culture when training younger generations. This NSF grant will provide support to about 20 top junior U.S.-based professionals (students and recently graduated post-doctoral fellows) to participate in the conference. In addition, because women and underrepresented minority groups have relatively low participation in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB), ACMBCB2017 will expand its "Women in Bioinformatics" organization to strongly encourage participation from women and other underrepresented junior researchers. Two senior professionals will be invited to share their experience and wisdom in career development, and to serve as mentors to facilitate young professional groups with the goal to continually build the community throughout the year. The goal of these activities is to increase the participation of junior researchers; train the next generation of researchers and educators in computer science, biological science, biomedical science and other related areas; broaden the diversity from underrepresented groups in BCB; and provide mentorship by senior researchers serve to young professionals to improve bioinformatics, computational biology, and health informatics community building in ACM SIGBio. The ACMBCB2017 conference will showcase leading-edge research on new technologies and techniques around gathering, processing, analyzing, and modeling of data and information for a variety of scientific, clinical, and healthcare applications, from bench to bedside. It will provide well planned and organized activities such as workshops, tutorials, oral sessions, and poster sessions for researchers from different disciplines to interact, to foster discussion and collaboration. The ACMBCB2017 materials, including contributions from the junior researchers (e.g., short research proposals and presentations) will be shared on website ACMBCB2017 (http://acm-bcb.org/2017/).