2^nd International Symposium on
Languages in Biology and Medicine (LBM) 2007
6-7 December 2007 @ Biopolis, Singapore
(http://lbm2007.biopathway.org/)

Language is a powerful tool that in its many manifestations is a system, used for communication, comprising a finite set of arbitrary symbols and a set of rules (or grammar) by which the manipulation of these symbols is governed. In biology and medicine, the importance of languages used to represent knowledge, communicate and query information is immense. Likewise auxiliary tasks such as translation, summarization and information extraction play important roles supporting scientific research. The automation of such tasks has significantly advanced knowledge discovery in biomedicine.

Incumbent technologies that discover, read and process language are continually stretched by the vigorous demands of bio-medical scientists and there is the continual need and incentive for language techniques to evolve. Despite this, the distinct communities involved in language processing rarely borrow from one another or look over the fence to see what other approaches are in use. And yet synergistic interactions across methodological disciplines and across different topics are frequently the harbingers of revolutionary technologies. In this context, it is imperative that we adopt diversification, more lateral and creative interaction between language professionals.

The International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine (LBM) 2007 seeks to provide a renewed opportunity for interaction between language professionals with different methodological backgrounds. LBM was established in 2005 and the remit of this event remains highly relevant today. The symposium focuses on the languages that are in active use for biology and medicine. We are calling for original research papers on, but not limited to the topics listed below. Papers focusing on application aspects of languages in biology and medicine are also invited.

• Natural language: text mining, retrieval and management;
• Ontology language: ontology construction, extension and management;
• Logic language: knowledge representation and induction;
• Sequence language: RNA structure prediction, protein domain prediction;
• Database language: database interface, query language;
• Visualization language: information visualization, molecular visualization

LBM2007 will consist of oral paper and poster presentation, invited speeches and a panel discussion. In addition to on-line conference proceedings, oral paper presentations will be published in BMC Bioinformatics and receive a MEDLINE citation.

The symposium is co-located with the International Conference on Genome Informatics (GIW), which will be held in Singapore from December 3 to 5, 2007.

Submission of Papers

Submission should follow BMC instructions for authors which could be found at http://lbm2007.biopathway.org/PaperSubmission and should not exceed 14 pages including references. Additional pages could be given to figures and tables.

Paper review will be double blind, so papers should not include authors’ names and affiliations. Self-references are to be avoided—instead of "As we showed in Smith et al. 1999...", say "As Smith et al. 1999 showed...." Paper submission software will allow authors to enter full author information separately. The paper submission site is http://www.easychair.org/LBM2007. Manuscripts must be submitted no later than September 9, 2007.

Important Dates

Paper submission due: September 30, 2007
Notification of acceptance: November 1, 2007
Camera ready due: November 30, 2007
LBM 2007 Conference: December 6-7, 2007

Steering Committee

See-Kiong Ng, NTU & I2R, Singapore
Jong C. Park, KAIST, South Korea
Limsoon Wong, NUS, Singapore

General Chairs

Jong C. Park, KAIST, South Korea
Limsoon Wong, NUS, Singapore

Programme Committee Chairs

Christopher J. O. Baker, I2R, Singapore
Su Jian, I2R, Singapore

Local Organizing Chair

Rajaraman Kanagasabai, I2R, Singapore

Programme Committee

Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester, UK
Vlad Bajic, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Chitta Baral, Arizona State University, USA
Christian Blaschke, Bioalma, Spain
Anita Burgun, Universite de Rennes, France
Werner Ceusters, Buffalo NY, USA
Kevin B. Cohen, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, USA
Nigel Collier, National Institute for Informatics, Japan
Mark Craven, University of Wisconsin, USA
Rebholz Dietrich, EMBL-EBI, UK
Julian Gough, University of Bristol, UK
Volker Haarslev, Concordia University, Canada
Udo Hahn, Jena University, Germany
Lynette Hirschman, MITRE, USA
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
Ewan Klein, Edinburgh University, UK
Satoshi Kobayashi, University of Electro-Communications, Japan
Michael Krauthammer, Yale University School of Medicine, USA
Patrick Lambrix, Linköping University, Sweden
Liu, Hong Fang, Georgetown University Medical Center, USA
Yves Lussier, University of Chicago, USA
Erik van Mulligen, Erasmus MC, Netherlands
Jinah Park, Information & Communications University, Korea
Tom Rindflesch, National Library of Medicine, USA
Jasmin Saric, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG, Germany
Neil Sarkar, Woods Hole, USA
Stefan Schulz, Freiburg University Hospital, Germany
Donia Scott, Open University, UK
Hagit Shatkay, Queen's University, Canada
Margaret Anne Storey, University Victoria, Canada
Jun'ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan, University of Manchester, UK
Alfonso Valencia, CNIO, Spain
W. John Wilbur, NIH, USA
Rene Witte, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Hong Yu, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI-CNRS, France

For more information, or to be placed on our mailing list for updates, please contact:
e-mail: lbm2007@biopathway.org
Website: http://lbm2007.biopathway.org/