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Bioinformatics and Life Science Informatics are emerging disciplines, which are concerned with the organization, modeling, analysis, and interpretation of data and information arising from research and development within the life sciences. A great deal of this work is directed towards understanding the structure and function of proteins, cells, the genome, and the process of natural evolution. The considerable algorithmic complexity of the underlying biological systems requires a huge amount of detailed information for their complete description. Very rapidly, vast amounts of biological information are becoming available in public information repositories, including DNA/RNA and protein sequence and structure databases, metabolic and signaling pathway databases, biomedical literature repositories, image databases, and many others. The key to advances in life science research and development lies in these information repositories and in future biological experiments and studies.
The principal approach to analyzing, modeling, and interpreting biological data is to abstract them into logical structures that support and incrementally promote the development of a more general conceptual framework for characterizing, explaining, and predicting processes in living systems. The available data and the need for making sense of them presents vast opportunities for the application of a wide range of artificial intelligence techniques, ranging from intelligent image analysis, machine learning, data mining, and text mining to knowledge representation and management, automatic reasoning, uncertainty management, and computational creativity. So far, these opportunities have not been extensively exploited.
This Workshop is intended to draw together researchers who are developing and applying artificial intelligence methods to bioinformatics and life science informatics problems. Submissions are particularly encouraged from those developing and applying artificial intelligence techniques to genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome research, systems biology, drug discovery/design, neuroinformatics, and artificial life research. With this Workshop we hope to raise the awareness and appreciation of artificial intelligence techniques in the life science and bioinformatics communities. A selection of papers presented at the Workshop will also be collected and published in a special issue of an international journal.
