Cloud Computing calls for papers / meetings & conferences

Call for Abstracts: International Society for Disease Surveillance Annual Conference

The ISDS Annual Conference is the premier event dedicated to the advancement of the science and practice of biosurveillance. This year’s theme, Expanding Collaborations to Chart a New Course in Public Health Surveillance, will highlight the importance of working together across agencies, sectors, and disciplines to improve surveillance methods and population health outcomes. The conference will be held at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina in San Diego, CA, December 4-5, 2012, with Pre-Conference Workshops on December 3rd.

The ISDS Conference draws professionals from a broad range of disciplines— epidemiology and computer science to mathematical modeling and health policy—to learn and contribute the latest achievements, methodologies, best practices, conceptual frameworks, and technical innovations in the rapidly evolving field of biosurveillance. This year's conference will provide fertile ground for cultivating new ideas and partnerships with roundtable discussions, panels and other opportunities to collaborate.

The scope of this conference includes all of the components, policies, methods, practices, infrastructure, research and evaluation related to timely surveillance of communicable diseases, chronic diseases and injuries. This includes notifiable conditions, adverse events and emerging/novel threats; biological, chemical, and radiological health threats; plant, animal, and food surveillance; and environmental monitoring.

Questions regarding the Call for Abstracts may be sent to Tera Reynolds, ISDS Program Manager.

Submission deadline: September 6, 2012 (11:59pm Eastern Daylight Time)

Authors notified of acceptance: October 3, 2012

Pre-Conference Workshops: December 3, 2012

Annual Conference: December 4-5, 2012

Submission Types

Note: All abstracts for the ISDS Conference will be submitted using ScholarOne. There is a limit of 4810 characters for the text of your submission. The character count includes spaces. The character count WILL include title, authors, institutions, tables, and images, but WILL NOT include presenting author brief biographical summaries (bios) or the abstract summary that will be used in the conference program.

Oral

All abstracts submitted for oral presentation are automatically considered for poster presentation as well. Include the following components when submitting an abstract for oral presentation:

· Title (85 characters MAX)

· Objective

· Introduction

· Methods

· Results

· Conclusions

· Acknowledgements

· References

· Names and affiliations of authors

· Brief bio of lead author/intended presenter (450 characters/75 words)

· Brief summary (600 characters/100 words) of submission to be used in conference program

Poster

Include the following components when submitting an abstract for poster presentation:

· Title (85 characters MAX)

· Objective

· Introduction

· Methods

· Results

· Conclusions

· Acknowledgements

· References

· Names and affiliations of authors

· Brief bio of lead author/intended presenter (450 characters/75 words)

· Brief summary (600 characters/100 words) of submission (for potential inclusion in conference program)

Panel *New for 2012*

Panel topics should be a specific aspect of design, theory, application, or experience pertaining to the science or practice of biosurveillance. Suggested panels should be comprised of no more than four participants and a moderator. A typical panel session will consist of four 15 minute presentations, each followed by 5 minutes of questions, with 10 minutes for closing discussion (presentation lengths will be subject to change based on final agenda). When submitting an abstract for a panel, include the following components:

· Title (85 characters MAX)

· Objective

· Introduction

· Panel description

· How the moderator intends to engage the audience in discussions on the panel topic

· Names of panel presenters, moderator and affiliations

· Brief bios for each panel presenter and moderator (450 characters/75 words each) for abstract reviewers to assess appropriateness to serve on the panel for the described topic

· Brief summary (600 characters/100 words) of panel to be used in conference program

Roundtable *New for 2012*

Roundtables can have up to three facilitators to briefly introduce the topic of interest and facilitate active discussion among attendees. Roundtables must be discussion-oriented rather than didactic, lecture-driven sessions. Roundtable discussions will be 60-90 minutes (depending on final agenda). When submitting an abstract for a roundtable, include the following components:

· Title (85 characters MAX)

· Objective

· Introduction

· Roundtable description

· How the facilitator intends to engage the audience in the roundtable discussion, including sample questions

· Names of facilitators and affiliations

· Brief bios for each facilitator (450 characters/75 words each) for abstract reviewers to assess appropriateness to lead a discussion on the described topic

· Brief summary (600 characters/100 words) of roundtable to be used in conference program

System Showcase Demonstrations *New for 2012*

System showcase demonstrations will be presented during the evening poster session on the first day of the conference. A typical demonstration will illustrate one or more aspects of an innovative population/public health surveillance system that is in use or under development. Demonstrations of open source and/or free products are strongly encouraged. System showcase demonstrations are not intended to be marketing or sales presentations and such submissions will be rejected; those interested in supporting the ISDS conference with an exhibit booth should contact Tera Reynolds at ISDS for more information. When submitting an abstract for a system showcase demonstration, include the following components:

· Title (85 characters MAX)

· Objective

· Introduction

· Description, highlighting benefits to public/population health surveillance and how this demonstration will be a unique addition to the ISDS conference

· Conclusions, including lessons learned and design principles from this demonstration that attendees can take away, even if not using or intending to use the system demonstrated

· Names of demonstrators and affiliations

· Brief summary (600 characters/100 words) of showcase to be used in conference program

Track Descriptions

I. Analytical Methods

a. Analytical Methods: Applied

b. Analytical Methods: Research & Development

This theme is focused on important and novel advances in the field of surveillance methodologies and analytical approaches. Abstracts in the Applied sub-track should describe methods or processes routinely used in a production-type environment. Abstracts in the Research and Development sub-track should describe methods and processes still under development or tested within a research or pilot setting. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

· Analytic evaluation of surveillance components

· Decision support

· Estimating morbidity and impact

· Evaluation of algorithms and systems through epidemic simulation

· Geospatial analysis

· Innovative use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology

· Integrating evidence from multiple sources

· Integration of mathematical modeling and statistical analyses

· New algorithms and evaluation of existing algorithms for cluster and event detection

· Pattern recognition algorithms

· Predictive disease modeling/predictive analytics

· Spatial cluster detection

· Statistical methods and tools for analyzing and interpreting data

· Time series analysis

II. Informatics

a. Informatics: Applied

b. Informatics: Research & Development

Abstracts in the Applied sub-track should describe methods or processes routinely used in a production-type environment. Abstracts in the Research and Development sub-track should describe methods and processes still under development or tested within a research or pilot setting. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

· Advances in methods for classifying data

· Approaches to building interoperable surveillance systems and components

· Borderless data exchange models (e.g. federated information sharing approaches)

· Cloud computing for public health surveillance

· Data integration – acquiring, moving, storing, processing, coding, normalizing, and preparing data for analysis between systems

· Data quality

· Data visualization methods

· Electronic health records and public health surveillance

· Health information exchange

· How clinical information systems can support public health surveillance efforts

· How public health information systems can support clinical efforts

· Informatics lessons learned

· Information and knowledge exchange

· Innovations in public health informatics

· Mobile technologies for public health

· Natural language processing

· Standards and Interoperability Framework (Public Health Reporting Initiative)

· Standards used in public health surveillance

· System architectures for limited connectivity environments and disaster surveillance

· System architectures for surveillance in low-resource environments

· System architectures to leverage HIE for public health surveillance

· System descriptions of real-world solutions to challenging integration problems

· Workforce requirements and training

· Use of social media for biosurveillance

III. Policy (at local, state, federal, international levels)

This theme is focused on sharing successes, challenges or approaches leveraged in the use or development of policy which affects biosurveillance operations and activities. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

· Creating successful surveillance partnerships

· Data sharing policies

· Federal policy agendas

· Funding strategies for surveillance

· How public health surveillance data have been used to inform policy

· International Health Regulations

· Legal/ethical/security/privacy issues in surveillance

· Meaningful Use responses by public health departments

· Policies around social media/leveraging social networks for risk communication, etc.

· Research collaborations to expand evidence-based health policy

· Workforce

IV. Public/Population health surveillance

a. Public/Population Health Surveillance: Practice

b. Public/Population Health Surveillance: Research

c. Public/Population Health Surveillance: Evaluation

This theme is focused on improving the daily processes of timely public/population health surveillance, including detection, signal validation, event characterization, investigation, and response. Abstracts in the Practice sub-track should describe practices routinely used in a production environment and/or deployed in field by public health departments or other agencies. Abstracts in the Research sub-track should describe research related to surveillance, health systems, etc. Abstracts in the Evaluation sub-track should describe evaluations of public/population health surveillance systems, workflows, protocols, etc. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

· Adverse drug events and pharmacovigilance

· Case studies

· Chronic disease surveillance

· Collaboration success stories

· Contact tracing and network analysis

· Disaster/event surveillance

· Disparities surveillance

· Evaluation of surveillance systems

· Infectious disease surveillance

· Influenza-like illness surveillance

· Injury surveillance

· Innovations in biosurveillance

· Integrating surveillance across multiple data sources

· Integrating surveillance systems, e.g. syndromic and reportable diseases

· Linking response with frontline health workers

· Meaningful Use and how it’s changing/not changing surveillance practice

· Measuring vaccine efficacy, coverage, etc.

· Messaging/risk communication (what to say to the public, politicians and media about syndromic systems alerts)

· Mobile technologies for public health

· Novel approaches to communicable diseases surveillance and reporting (e.g., notifiable conditions, MRSA, nosocomial infections)

· OneHealth

· Outbreak detection, characterization and outbreak management

· School and university surveillance

· Situational awareness

· Social media and surveillance

· Surveillance across borders

· Surveillance for refugees and recent immigrants

· Surveillance in resource-limited settings

· Surveillance using ambulatory care data

· Surveillance using inpatient data

· Vaccine-preventable disease surveillance

Call for Abstracts: Advances in eHealth 2012 Workshop

The workshop provides a forum for eHealth researchers from multiple disciplines to share current advances and research on increasing the effectiveness and adoption of technology in healthcare in the coming decade. This ranges from the use of sensor devices, human-computer interfaces, to cloud based medical record systems in order to provide radically new solutions for helping patients. At the same time medical informatics and large scale genomics data analysis are playing major role in clarifying the opportunities for personalized medicine applications. Biobanks as the back end of data-driven biomedical science open the possibilities for studying genetic and environmental influences over time, accelerating the pace of biomedical research. On other hand, ongoing efforts toward a global sharing of digital healthcare data will pave the way to maximize the potential for knowledge discovery.

These advances require structural changes as well as technological development. Society is facing an increase in chronic degenerative diseases that require monitoring and long-term patient management, the growing desire of patients to be treated in a family environment in order to protect their social ties, and, finally, a need to reduce costs. These factors necessitate a new strategic orientation in services and infrastructures for supporting these services. Both the shift towards networked sensors and cloud-based systems also require new security concepts to facilitate secure and effective use of these systems.

We are looking for papers that address medium to large-scale and medium to long-term challenges for eHealth and potential solutions.

The workshop is part of the eScience2012 conference (http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/escience2012), 8-12 October 2012, Chicago, USA.

Workshop twitter hashtag: #aeh2012

Topics of interest include but not limited to:

Medical Simulations
Computing Infrastructures for eHealth
Data Storage, Transfer, and Indexing Systems for eHealth Applications
Security & Privacy for eHealth
HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) for eHealth
User Studies of eHealth Systems
Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems and Applications
Bio-banking and eHealth
Data Mining and Applications for Personalized Medicine

Workshop format
The workshop will include invited speakers, paper presentation sessions and a tentative panel discussion.

Organizing Committee
Rossen Apostolov, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
rossen@kth.se
Matthew Smith, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany
smith@dcsec.uni-hannover.de
Tristan Glatard, CREATIS, Medical Imaging Research Center, Lyon, France
tristan.glatard@creatis.insa-lyon.fr

Important dates
Abstract submission: 4 July 2012
Paper submission: 11 July 2012
Paper author notification: 22 August 2012
Camera-ready papers due: 10 September 2012
Conference: 8-12 October 2012

Submission guidelines
Authors are invited to submit papers with unpublished, original work of not more than 8 pages of double column text using single spaced 10 point size on 8.5 x 11 inch pages, as per IEEE 8.5 x 11 manuscript guidelines. (Up to 2 additional pages may be purchased for US$150/page). Templates are available from http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.

Authors should submit a PDF file that will print on a PostScript printer to https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aeh2012

(Note that paper submitters also must submit an abstract in advance of the paper deadline. This should be done through the same site where papers are submitted.)

It is a requirement that at least one author of each accepted paper attend the conference.

Call for Papers: Analyzing and Improving Collaborative eScience with Social Networks (eSoN 12)

Workshop to be held with IEEE e-Science 2012

Monday, 8 October 2012, Chicago, IL, USA

Social networking is profoundly changing the way that people communicate and interact on a daily basis. As eScience is inherently collaborative, social networks can serve as a vital means for supporting information and resource sharing, aiding discovery of connected individuals, improving communication between globally dispersed individuals, and even measuring scientific impact. Consequently, eScience systems are increasingly integrating social networking concepts to improve collaboration. For example researcher profiles and groups exist in publication networks, such as Google scholar and Mendeley, and eScience infrastructures, such as MyExperiment, NanoHUB and GlobusOnline all utilize social networking principles to enhance scientific collaboration. In addition to incorporating explicit social networks, eScience infrastructures can also leverage implicit social networks extracted from relationships expressed in collaborative activities (e.g. publication and grant authorship or citation networks).

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from a diverse range of areas to establish a new community focused on the application of social networking to analyze and improve scientific collaboration. There are two complementary areas of focus for this workshop 1) how to efficiently share infrastructure and software resources, such as data and tools through social networks, and 2) how to analyze and enhance collaboration in eScience through both implicit and explicit social networks, for example analyzing scientific impact through citation networks or improving collaboration by associating data and tools with networks of publications and researchers.

This workshop represents the amalgamation of two complementary workshops held in 2011: Social Networks for CCGrids (SN4CCGrids) held at CCGrid 2011 and Measuring the Impact of eScience Research (MeSR) held at eScience 2011.
Scope of workshop

The topics of interest are, but not limited to, the use of social networks to analyze and improve collaborative eScience:

The use of social networks and social networking concepts in eScience and eResearch
Social network applications used for eScience
Social network based resource sharing and collaboration architectures
New forms of collaborative computing and resource sharing
Social Cloud computing
Novel applications of digital relationships and trust
Definition of novel principals, models and methodologies for harnessing digital relationships
Extraction of implicit social networks from scientific activities (publication, citation and grants)
Analysis of collaborative scientific activity through social networks

Submission instructions

Authors are invited to submit papers containing unpublished, original work (not under review elsewhere) of up to 8 pages of double column text using single spaced 10 point size on 8.5 x 11 inch pages, as per IEEE 8.5 x 11 manuscript guidelines.

Templates are available from: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.

Authors should submit a PDF or PostScript (level 2) file that will print on a PostScript printer. Papers conforming to the above guidelines can be submitted through the workshop's paper submission system: TBD

At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop and all workshop participants must pay the eScience 2012 workshop registration fee, as well as the conference fee. All accepted papers will be published by the IEEE in the same volume as the main conference. All papers will be reviewed by an International Programme Committee (with a minimum of 3 reviews per paper). Papers submissions should be performed using the XXX system, by the date mentioned below.

Important dates

Paper Submissions Due: July 27, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: August 27, 2012
Camera Ready Versions Due: September 17, 2012
Workshop: October 8, 2012