Information Science calls for papers / meetings & conferences

Call for Papers: International Conference in Modeling Health Advances (ICMHA'12)

San Francisco, USA, 24-26 October, 2012

The International Conference in Modeling Health Advances 2012 will take place in San Francisco, USA, 24-26 October, 2012.

A host of new diseases, like HIV/AIDS, BSE, Avian Flu, West Nile Virus and others have appeared on the scene during the last twenty five years and undoubtedly, more will come in the coming years. To tackle these illnesses, the cooperation of modelers, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and others, and of researchers from the medical community is absolutely essential. Modeling is important because it gives important insight into the method of treatment. In the case of HIV/AIDS, for example, mathematical modeling indicated that a combination of both protease inhibitors and reverse transcriptase inhibitors would be far more effective than any one of these two drugs.

The purpose of this conference is to bring all the people working in the area of epidemiology under one roof and encourage mutual interaction.

The conference ICMHA'12 is held under the World Congress on Engineering and Computer Science WCECS 2012. The WCECS 2012 is organized by the International Association of Engineers (IAENG), a non-profit international association for engineers and computer scientists. The congress has the focus on the frontier topics in the theoretical and applied engineering and computer science subjects. The last IAENG conference has attracted more than five hundred participants from over 30 countries. All submitted papers will be under peer review and accepted papers will be published in the conference proceeding (ISBN: 978-988-19251-6-9). The abstracts will be indexed and available at major academic databases. The accepted papers will also be considered for publication in the special issues of the journal Engineering Letters, in IAENG journals and in edited books by publishers like Springer.

Important Dates:
Draft Paper Submission Deadline: 2 July, 2012
Camera-Ready Papers Due & Registration Deadline: 30 July, 2012
ICMHA 2012: 24-26 October, 2012

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 Papers: 3rd Workshop on Research in the Large – App Stores, Wide Distribution, and Big Data in MobileHCI Research

at MobileHCI 2012, San Francisco, California

Deadline: May 25th, 2012
Workshop: September 21st, 2012

http://large.mobilelifecentre.org

Theme

Traditionally, mobile HCI studies have often been conducted in highly controlled environments, involving small numbers of users. App stores and other wide distribution channels have now provided researchers with a enormous opportunity to move outside the lab. Indeed, many researchers have started to use public deployments and big data for mobile HCI research. Publishing apps in mobile application stores and public APIs for mobile services enable researchers to study large samples in their ‘natural habitat’ – but this also requires adaptation of evaluation and research methods, and dealing with deployment issues previously unencountered by most MobileHCI researchers.

This workshop continues the ‘Research in the Large’ workshop series held at UbiComp 2010 and 2011. Relevant topics include the design of large-scale studies, reaching target users, dealing with new types of evaluation data, and heterogeneous usage contexts. We seek ways to systematically collect, analyse and make sense of large datasets, potentially in real-time.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and developers from academia and industry to exchange experiences, insights and strategies for wide distribution of research apps and the resulting large data streams these deployments produce. We aim at building an understanding of the opportunity of the different channels and the issues and obstacles involved in a research context.

Topics

We welcome participants from both industry and academia who have an interest and/or experience in the following themes:

- Methods & experiences with research through app stores and other distribution platforms
- Strategies for attracting and recruiting a suitable sample
- Dealing with big data: infrastructure, tools and experiences in dealing with large- scale datasets, potentially those growing by millions of data points every day
- Statistical & visual analysis methods and tools for the various sorts of data resulting from public apps
- New developments of distribution channels, tools and infrastructures, and their potential effects
- Dealing with uncertainty and data noise
- Identifying interesting usage and experience patterns for further research
- Combination of large-scale studies with smaller studies
- Re-integration of research in the large outcomes in the design & development process of apps
- Design of appropriate large-scale studies based on given research questions
- Approaches to increase internal and external validity

Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit their contribution, in PDF format conform to the ACM Mobile HCI 2012 archive format electronically via EasyChair no later than May 25th, 2012. Submissions are expected to be either up to 4 pages describing research that addresses one or more of the workshop’s themes or up to 2 pages position papers on the opportunities and challenges ahead. Papers must be anonymized and will be reviewed by a program committee from industry and academia.

The program committee will nominate a best paper, which will be included in a special issue of the International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI).

Important Dates

* Friday May 25, 2012 – Submission Deadline
* Friday June 29, 2012 – Acceptance Notification
* Monday July 23, 2012 – Revised Manuscript Due
* Friday September 21, 2012 – Workshop in San Francisco!

Call for Papers: International Telecommunication Union Kaleidoscope 2013 Building Sustainable Communities Academic Conference

22–24 April 2013, Kyoto, Japan

Kaleidoscope 2013 Building Sustainable Communities is the fifth in a series of peer-reviewed academic conferences organized
by ITU that brings together a wide range of views from universities, industry and research institutions of different fields. The aim of Kaleidoscope conferences is to identify emerging developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at an early stage to generate successful products and services through the development of international and open standards.

Future technologies should be designed to enhance the quality of human life. Kaleidoscope 2013 will, therefore, highlight multidisciplinary aspects of future ICTs including future services and applications demand as well as socio-economic, cultural, ethical, legal, and sustainable development policy aspects of communities of the future.

ICTs can be used as a catalyst for transforming life to meet the challenges of the new millennium, including global economic and
financial crises, high unemployment rates, accessibility issues, global diseases, food availability and distribution, climate change,
environmental disasters, energy consumption, transport systems, safety, security, and welfare.

Sustainable communities will combine human-oriented technologies and human values.

Besides technical issues, building sustainable communities also raises ethical concerns such as responsibility for future generations and for the environment, as well as for data and information privacy. Therefore, an improved understanding of technology, its suitable application, and a high consideration of its potential consequences are necessary.

To address these issues, and for a co-evolution of technology and sustainable communities, standards are indispensable. Developing these standards will require concerted global efforts by inter-sectoral stakeholders. This conference will help to further such collaborations.

Building Sustainable Communities is calling for original academic papers offering innovative and bold approaches in research
and development to build smart, ethical, and sustainable communities.

Submission of papers
Prospective authors, from countries that are Members of ITU, are invited to submit complete, original papers with a maximum
length of 4,500 words within eight pages including summary and references, using the template available on the event website.
Paper proposals will be evaluated according to content, originality, clarity, relevance to the conference’s theme and, in particular, significance to future standards.

Suggested (non-exclusive) list of topics

Track 1: Technology and architecture evolution

-- Long-distance and ultra-high-speed transmission network systems (terabit, exabit)
-- Disaster relief systems, network resilience and recovery
-- Wireless sensor networks
-- Optical wireless communication
-- Human-centric, cognitive and context-aware systems
-- Machine-to-machine communication and Internet of Things
-- Body-area networks
-- Near-field communications
-- Environmental and biometric actuators and sensors
-- Security and privacy-enhancing technologies
-- Pervasive and trusted network and service infrastructure
-- Mobility and nomadicity
-- Adaptive antenna techniques

Track 2: ICT applications and services for sustainable communities

-- e-government and e-democracy
-- e-learning and e-science
-- e-agriculture
-- e-health and telemedicine
-- Ageing and ambient assistive living
-- Smart cities: utilities, transport, buildings and homes
-- Innovative applications and content delivery (IPTV, games, etc.)
-- Mobile payment and money transfer
-- Augmented reality and technology intelligence
-- Location-based services
-- Service layer requirements
-- XaaS (Anything as a Service)
-- QoS for differentiated source
-- Location services

Track 3: Social, economic and policy aspects of ICT in sustainable communities

-- Digital rights and identity management
-- Societal impact
-- Legislative and regulatory frameworks
-- Security, confidentiality and privacy
-- Accessibility and usability
-- Business models (including accounting, billing and charging)
-- Standardization models
-- Network neutrality
-- Inclusiveness, affordability and equal access
-- Internationalization and localization
-- Environmental sustainability
-- Ethical issues
-- Regulation (for QoS, network sharing, etc.)
-- Standardization and innovation management
-- Stakeholder perceptions in standards
-- Standards in healthcare services

Deadlines
Submission of full paper proposals: 10 September 2012
Notification of paper acceptance: 12 November 2012
Submission of camera-ready accepted papers: 3 December 2012

Contact: kaleidoscope@itu.int

Call for Papers and Apps: 2012 VIVO Conference

August 22 - 24, 2012 Miami, Florida

Who should attend?

Scholars, scientists, researchers, developers, publishers, funding agencies, research officers, students, institutional officials and those supporting the development of team science.

We are pleased to invite you to participate in this year's VIVO conference with contributions to the meeting. We request papers, panels and poster presentations exploring the many aspects of the world research community's vision for VIVO.

Submissions: All submissions are handled electronically at EasyChair. For information on submission requirements, refer to the Official Call for Papers http://vivoweb.org/files/VIVO%202012%20Call%20for%20Papers.pdf

Abstracts are due May 30.

Topics of interest:

Facilitating researcher collaboration and networking

Managing/discovering knowledge about researchers across institutional, disciplinary, and national boundaries

Approaches to the adoption of VIVO and related systems that interoperate through shared ontologies and Linked Open Data

The intersection of VIVO and international research standards

Research representation ontology/development

Open representations of research and implications for the research process, collaboration, and virtual research communities

Perspectives on policy, research representation, and research impact, including questions of privacy, individual vs. institutional sourcing of data, and change over time

Semantic Web development and extensions of the VIVO platform to reach the full Web community

Open research data and related issues in discovery, reuse, and attribution

Call for Apps

The conference is sponsoring a competition for applications using VIVO data to support science. Entries are due July 31. Refer to the Call for Applications for submission information, including eligibility, evaluation criteria and prizes.

Registration and additional conference information to follow.

About the Conference

The third annual VIVO conference runs from August 22 - 24, 2012 at the InterContinental in Miami, FL. This year's VIVO conference creates a unique opportunity for people from across the country and around the world to come together in the spirit of promoting scholarly collaboration and research discovery. Read more at the conference website, http://vivoweb.org/conference.

Call for Papers: Fifth International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM 2012)

September 3rd and 4th, Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland

SMBM 2012 aims to bring together researchers from text and data mining in biomedicine, medical, bio- and chemoinformatics, and researchers active in biomedical ontology design and engineering, and the Semantic Web. The combined research helps to promote full integration of data and factual content from large text collections, biological databases, ontological and terminological resources, and from the Web.

However, many challenges have yet to be met to achieve this ambitious goal. Significant advances have been made and many working systems for tasks ranging from semantics driven literature analysis to cross-resource data analysis and open linked data on the web have been suggested and deployed. Where do we stand and how do we advance toward fully integrated systems combining the different solutions and data sources?

We are inviting papers from a full range of topics (see below), emphasizing in particular work on methods deployed in a production-like research environment, user-facing applications of text mining technology, the integration of text with domain resources such as content from reference databases (e.g., UniProt, EntrezGene, OMIM) and semantic resources such as GO, UMLS etc. We also welcome contributions from across the biomedical domains, including genomics, translational medicine, clinical practice, and public health.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Development and use of biomedical semantic resources

Terminology and ontology development for biomedical information systems including terminology evolution

Integration of text and data mining in the biomedical domain

(Semantic) Web mining of biomedical information

Text mining, information extraction, and information retrieval for the biomedical domain

Evaluation techniques and standards for text mining solutions

Annotation schemes for biomedical corpora

Text mining for resource building, e.g. ontologies, and resource enrichment, e.g., biomedical databases

Representation and discovery of biomedical domain knowledge

Image/caption processing in relation to content extraction

Domain-specific reasoning processes, e.g., to infer non-explicit information, validation (trust-worthiness, believability, safety) of extracted information

Integration of text mining in biological database curation workflows

All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings that will be available online. We invite three categories of papers: full research papers, short papers and system papers. Research papers will be given an oral presentation, short papers a poster presentation, and systems papers will be presented in systems demonstration sessions. System papers should describe an implemented system related to a topic of interest that the authors will demonstrate live during the symposium. The final modality of presentation will be decided by the organizing committee.

Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version for publication in a special issue of an open-access journal (details to be announced).

Submissions should follow the ACL instructions for authors, with a maximal limit of seven (7) pages (plus one optional page for references). The recommended length for system papers and poster submissions is four (4) pages. Manuscripts will be submitted electronically as PDF files. Reviewing will be double-blind, and submissions should therefore NOT contain author names or other obviously identifying information.

SMBM 2012 is the follow-up to to the successful series:

SMBM 2005 (EBI, U.K.), SMBM 2006 (University of Jena, Germany), SMBM 2008 (University of Turku, Finland) and SMBM 2010 (EBI, U.K). A parallel event (LBM: The International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine) has been held in 2005 (KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea), 2007 (Matrix, Biopolis, Singapore), 2009 (Jeju Island, South Korea) and 2011 (NTU, Singapore).

Important dates
Paper submission deadline: June 8th 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 1st 2012
Symposium dates: September 3-4th 2012

Call for Papers: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2012 Fall Symposium on Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery in Biomedical Text

November 2-4, 2012 Arlington, Virginia

Submission Deadline: 25 May 2012

The amount of biological and medical literature has grown exponentially within the last decade. This data may be in the form of journal citations in PubMed, in the form of clinical summaries in healthcare institutions or in the form of blogs and user comments that express personal opinions on the different healthcare topics such as drug adverse effects or disease treatments. This material, be it expressed by researchers, medical professionals or medical care receivers, is of significant importance in terms of the wealth of information that it possesses. However, it is only valuable if efficient and reliable ways of accessing and analyzing that information are available.

In this symposium we would like to address novel research on computational techniques for information retrieval and knowledge discovery from biomedical and clinical texts, with a focus on machine learning and/or natural language processing, as well as novel applications of existing techniques to the open problems in text processing in biomedical domain. We will invite several speakers from the biomedical text processing community who will present current research problems in this field, and we will invite contributed talks on novel learning approaches that can improve the analysis and retrieval of biological and medical information.

We solicit two types of submissions to the symposium:

1. Contributed talks and/or posters
We invite submissions that address new algorithmic and methodological contributions to the spectrum of problems in biomedical text analysis, where textual resources can include semi-structured and unstructured biomedical text, clinical text, social media and any other healthcare related text media.

2. Open problems
For open problems, we request the authors to submit a one page description that motivates and explains an existing open problem in text analysis and information retrieval in biomedical domain. The main goal here is to foster active discussion.

Papers for the symposium will be collected and made into an AAAI technical report, which will be distributed to attendees on CD and included in the AAAI Digital Library. The issuance of technical report allows the work to be cited.

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission Deadline: May 25, 2012

Notification of acceptance: June 22, 2012

Camera-ready papers : September 7, 2012

AAAI 2012 Fall Symposium: November 2-4, 2012

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to direct your questions to
Rezarta.Islamaj@nih.gov or Lana.Yeganova@nih.gov

AAAI 2012 Fall Symposium Organizers:
Lana Yeganova, PhD, Staff Scientist, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.

Rezarta Islamaj Dogan, PhD, Research Fellow, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.

Vahan Grigoryan, PhD, Associate, Cloud Analytics Group, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Mark Dredze, PhD, Assistant Research Professor, Department of Computer Science and the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, Johns Hopkins University.

Call for Papers: First Workshop on Maintainable Software Practices in e-Science

Co-located with
8th IEEE International Conference on eScience, Chicago, Illinois

October 8-12, 2012

The 1st Workshop on Maintainable Software Practices in e-Science, co-located with the 8th IEEE International Conference on eScience, provides a dedicated forum for the research community to discuss new research, experiences and best practice in developing and maintaining software within an e-Science context.

One of the most pressing issues for computational science is the creation of software and data that is sustainable and reusable. Today’s researchers are using more and more complex software stacks that is produced in increasingly ad hoc ways [Mer10]. Software development has become more and more common (current estimates state that 45% of scientists spend more time developing software now than they did 5 years ago [Han09]), particularly within e-Science projects which often have a mix of research and software development roles. At the same time, stakeholders are asking researchers to consider their software sustainability as part of their data management plans, with “Software as Infrastructure” being adopted as a model [EPSRC11, NSF11]. The management, curation and development of scientific software – which has often started life as a rough prototype – is a key area to support to enable high quality research.

This workshop will focus on the issues relating to the development and maintenance of software that can endure past the limited periods of defined project durations and project funding, and go beyond software engineering best practice to address aspects of cultural, organisational and policy change. By bringing together all those with an interest in ensuring the longer term development and use of software for research, including researchers, developers, research computing specialists, software engineers, infrastructure providers, facilitators, and funders, the goal of this workshop is to understand what software practices can be successfully applied and which lead to long-term improvements in the development of software for e-Science.

As part of the workshop we will also be running a panel on the topic of culture change in software management for research, featuring invited speakers from a variety of disciplines who have experienced or instigated these changes, to talk about their real life experiences of scientists of what worked and didn’t work for them.

Topics of Interest
We invite the submission of original work that is related to the topics below. The papers can be either short (5 pages) position papers, or full (10 pages) research papers.

Topics of interest include:

software engineering and software product management best practice as applied to e-Science and computational science;
community development, collaborative development, and widening adoption;
licensing, funding, and business models for eScience and research software;
managing governance and organisational change during the software lifecycle;
measuring and analysing the impact of software and software processes;
software attribution, citation, and credit;
interaction between researchers, developers and stakeholders;
transferable software practices from industry.

Submission Instructions

Important Dates

Abstract Due: June 18th, 2012
Papers Due: July 2nd, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: August 13th, 2012
Camera Ready Papers Due: August 31st, 2012
[EPSRC11] “Software As An Infrastructure”, EPSRC Strategic Framework (draft for comment), Published online 24 November 2011, http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/ourportfolio/SoftwareAsAnInfrastructureDRAFT.pdf

[Han09] Hannay, Jo, et al., “How do scientists develop and use scientific software?” Proceedings of 2009 ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering, p1-8, 2009 | doi: 10.1109/SECSE.2009.5069155

[Mer10] Merali, Zeeya, “Computational science: Error…why scientific programming does not compute”, Nature 467, 775-777 (2010) | doi:10.1038/467775a, Published online 13 October. 2010, http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101013/full/467775a.html

[NSF11] National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force onSoftware for Science and Engineering Final Report, March 2011 http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/taskforces/TaskForceReport_Software.pdf

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