Collaboration and Data-Sharing Tools meetings & conferences

ACM Sixth International Workshop on Data and Text Mining in Biomedical Informatics (DTMBIO)

October 29, 2012

In conjunction with ACM 20th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) Maui, Hawaii, USA

October 29-November 2, 2012

DTMBIO 12 organizers are pleased to announce that the sixth DTMBIO will be held in conjunction with CIKM, one of the largest data and text mining conferences. While CIKM presents the state-of-the-art research in informatics with the primary focus on data and text mining, the main focus of DTMBIO is on biomedical and healthcare informatics. DTMBIO delegates will bring forth interesting applications of up-to-date informatics in the context of biomedical research.

Biological researchers face the current challenge of making effective use of the enormous amount of electronic biomedical data in order to better understand and explain complex biological systems. The biomedical data repositories include data in a wide variety of forms, including bibliographic information from electronic medical journals, gene expression data from Microarray experiments, protein identification and quantification data from proteomics experiments, genomic sequences gathered by the Human Genome Project, and patient healthcare records. The ability to automatically and effectively extract, integrate, understand and make use of information embedded in such heterogeneous - structured and unstructured - data remains a challenging task.

Topic of Interest
The relevant topics include the following (but not limited to):

- Proposal and assessment of novel Text Mining (TM) evaluation
- Evaluation methods of biomedical applications, shared tasks
- Biomedical and Clinical text mining applications
- Information extraction from biomedical and clinical corpora (full texts, abstracts, EHRs, clinical trials, etc)
- Information retrieval from large biomedical data collections
- Gene sequence annotation
- Protein/RNA structure prediction
- Medical Ontologies and Text Mining
- Sequence and structural motifs
- Modeling of biochemical pathways and biological networks
- Image Mining in Medical and healthcare informatics
- Data and Text Mining solutions in biomedical informatics, for applications such as drug development, system biology, biomedical working processes
- Information integration for Data and Text Mining
- Mining multi-relational data

NTTS (New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics) 2013

5 to 7 March 2013 Brussels, Belgium

NTTS (New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics) 2013 is an international scientific conference on the impact of new technologies on statistical collection, production and dissemination systems.

The purpose of the conference is to stimulate and facilitate the preparation of new innovative projects, to encourage cooperation and possible building of consortia by researchers with the aim of enhancing the quality and usefulness of official statistics and to prepare activities related to research in statistics within the next European Framework Programme for Research and Development (Horizon 2020).

Previous NTTS conferences were organised in 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2009 and 2011.

The NTTS 2013 conference will take place from 5 to 7 March 2013 in Brussels.

Aim and scope

Present and share the outcomes of recent research activities in statistics in general and in official statistics including Eurostat ESSnet projects and VIP (Vision Infrastructure Projects).

Promote new research methodological and technological development for use by Official Statistics.

Present the new research framework from 2014 onwards (Horizon 2020) in terms of orientations and deadlines and prepare further content and partnership for possible proposals submission.

Discuss future needs and developments of research in statistics, new paradigms for data use, access and retrieval (open data, big data, organic data) and ICT developments and infrastructures for use by Official Statistics.

Conference topics

NTTS 2013 addresses research and development aspects related to innovative methods and techniques for official statistics with a particular emphasis on automatic and ICT-based methods. Papers are accepted in the following areas:

New ways of collecting, accessing and using big amount of data. The Cyber-infrastructure has changed the way data are collected, accessed and managed. New sampling techniques and new survey approaches and methodologies for Official Statistics are also an important aspect of this area.

Integration, consolidation, combination of multiple data sources. ICT-based surveys and cross-linking of statistical data and their combination with textual, spatial, transactional and/or image information coming from different sources are an example of this phenomenon. The combination and use of multiple types of ancillary information (administrative data, organic data) is another example.

Analysing data. The high dimensionality, large amount and diversity of data types and structures, require new paradigms, mathematical background, computational methods and modeling approaches for data mining and analysis. The need to monitor and measure policies at different geographical levels (Small Area Estimation) requires new modeling techniques. New paradigms like moving from data to statistical information and from statistical information to knowledge should be considered. Issues like estimation methods and management of non-response are also be part of this area.

Distributing, presenting and accessing data and microdata. ICT has deeply changed the way information is presented, distributed and accessed. This has an impact on statistical data dissemination, visualization and retrieval. Topics like narratives, remote access, graphical and data visualization tools, data confidentiality, synthetic files are included in this area.

Support for evidence-based policymaking. Robust and scalable indicators building models have been produced for decades. How can new indicators be generated using multiple data types and how can we ensure their quality? Topics on GDP and Beyond and Well-Being indicators are also part of this area.

Use of standards for Official statistics. The ESS is confronted with new requirements for designing the future architecture of integrated statistical production systems. This requires further research and development in the use and integration of meta/paradata and their format, reengineering of the statistical production chain using enterprise architecture modeling, new collaborative tools and innovative distributed environments.

39th Association for Gerontology in Higher Education Annual Meeting and Educational Leadership Conference

Waves of Change: Charting the Course for Gerontology Education

February 28 - March 3, 2013 St. Petersburg, Florida

The AGHE Annual Meeting and Educational Leadership Conference is the premier national forum for discussing ideas and issues in gerontological and geriatric education. Educators, clinicians, administrators, researchers, and students share their experiences, expertise, and innovations regarding teaching and learning about aging and older persons. Plan now to be part of this opportunity for professional growth and development.

Upon completion of the Annual Meeting, participants will be better able to:

Describe educational programs and models addressing gerontology and geriatric content at a variety of higher education and learner levels

Understand key educational public policy issues as they relate to funding for higher education and work force preparedness

Identify factors that facilitate gerontology and geriatric education program growth and sustainability

Utilize educational evaluation methods to document learner outcomes and program value

Compare and apply teaching materials, methods, and tools in a variety of content areas to improve their institution’s educational programs

Develop collaborative opportunities in the scholarship of teaching and learning, with national and international colleagues in the field of aging

Strengthen the learning experiences and mentoring available to students in the field of gerontology and geriatrics education

2012 Quetelet Seminar--Adult Mortality and Morbidity

December 5-7, 2012 Research Centre in Population and Societies, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Numerous demographic studies have been focusing on mortality and range from analysis of age-specific mortality to cause-of-death analysis or risks factors analysis. In countries with a long statistical tradition, mortality levels by sex, age and cause of death are easily obtained. Epidemiologists as well as demographers took interest in identifying risks factors and markers by age, sex and cause. Although these factors and markers remain the same for morbidities and the resulting mortality, little is known about morbidity levels, be it in terms of prevalence or incidence, except for pathologies that are recorded in specific registrars or for which large surveys are conducted. In countries with incomplete demographic data, both mortality and morbidity are little or badly documented except when subjected to specific surveys such as under-5 mortality or, to a lesser extent, morbidity. The need for medical diagnosis and assessment of severity of illness makes morbidity data collection especially challenging. Morbidity data collection is especially challenging as it involves. In addition, in armed conflict, post-conflict or natural disaster situations, evaluating the number of victims is crucial to assess needs as well as to ease the reconciliation process.

The 2012 Quetelet Seminar will focus on adult age morbidity and mortality analysis from the data collection and measurement perspective. It will be organised in collaboration with the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (UCL-CRED/WHO) and International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and Their Health in Developing Countries (INDEPTH). Communications will cover existing or in-the-making tools for data collection and measurement that serve to estimate adult-age morbidity levels in countries with good-level statistical data and adult-age morbidity and mortality levels in countries with incomplete data. Particular attention will be devoted to papers that deal with estimating mortality and morbidity in crisis or post-crisis time.

The 2012 Quetelet Seminar will be organised along the following three axes:

1. Morbidity Analysis

What are the existing data collection and measurement tools to estimate incidence and prevalence of diseases, including chronic diseases? What are their limits?

What morbidity data collection and registration tools are most effective? What are the most reliable data to collect for the measurement of functional and cognitive abilities in a population so as to evaluate dependency ratios? What health monitoring systems should be developed to detect and prevent infectious disease?

2. Adult mortality in countries where data are incomplete

What are the latest developments in the estimation of adult mortality in countries where civil registration data are incomplete or non-existent? How has adult mortality changed recently in developing countries, more than three decades after the onset of the HIV epidemic and in a context of increased access to antiretroviral treatment? Beyond mortality levels, how are inequalities in adult mortality analysed (by sex, according to educational or poverty levels)? What are the lessons to be learned from demographic surveillance sites, particularly in terms of causes of death, as reflected by verbal autopsies and associated tools?

3. Demographic impacts of armed conflicts and natural disasters

What impact armed conflicts and natural disasters have on adult morbidity and mortality? How is this impact measured? What different forms of resilience develop and how are they captured? What early warning systems can be put in place to limit the impact of disasters?

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.

International Federation for Information Processing/International Medical Informatics Association International Working Conference on Interfacing Bio- and Medical Informatics

27 September 2012 Amsterdam, the Netherlands

From 24 to 26 September 2012 the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is having its World Computer Congress WCC2012 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (www.wcc-2012.org). During the WCC2010 conference in Brisbane, Australia, IFIP and the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) organized a joint conference for the first time in their history. Also this time a joint one-day associated meeting will be held on Thursday 27 September. The topic of this meeting will be the link between bioinformatics and medical informatics. IFIP’s Working Groups 5.13 Bioinformatics and its applications and IMIA’s Working Group on Informatics in Genomic Medicine (IGM) are working in this area and supporting this event.

Contact
Prof.dr. Arie Hasman e-mail: a.hasman@amc.uva.nl

Conference topics

Applications:

Personalized medicine

Cancer informatics

Population genetics

Bioinformatics approaches for diseases study

Genomics and proteomics in medicine

Analysis of gene expression, mutation, variations and next generation sequencing

Linking genotype with phenotype

Tools:

Databases, data management and integration

Query languages, information retrieval, interoperability, biomedical ontologies and semantics

Knowledge discovery, machine learning, pattern recognition and text mining

Data visualization

High-performance, grid and cloud computing

American Society of Human Genetics 62nd Annual Meeting

Tuesday, November 6 through Saturday, November 10, 2012 San Francisco, California

The world's top scientists and clinicians in the human genetics field will gather to present their latest research findings at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), which will be held on November 6-10, 2012, in San Francisco, CA (http://www.ashg.org/2012meeting). ASHG is the primary professional membership organization for human genetics specialists worldwide, representing nearly 8,000 researchers, academicians, clinicians, genetic counselors, nurses, and others with a special interest in this area (http://www.ashg.org).

The ASHG Annual Meeting continues to be the largest human genetics meeting in the world, attracting more than 7,000 scientific participants each year. The ASHG 2012 Meeting will provide attendees with the latest information about cutting-edge developments in human genetics and genomics research. In addition, nearly 250 U.S. and international exhibitors at this year's ASHG Exhibitor Trade Show will offer an unprecedented opportunity to view the latest advances in genetics-related products and services derived, in part, from work presented at previous ASHG meetings.

Topics to be addressed in the scientific program for the ASHG 2012 Meeting will include: gene discovery in human genetics; new insights and challenges from next generation sequencing; advances in medical genetics and translation/applications in clinical care; progress in gene therapy; personalized medicine; cancer genetics; advances in non-invasive prenatal diagnosis; revelations about human alleles from studies of model organisms; implications of population genetic studies; modeling in statistical genetics; data centralization and its implications for our field; ethical, legal and social implications of genomics; changes in genetics education; and much more.

For more information about the ASHG 2012 Annual Meeting, or to register and/or submit an abstract for presentation at this year’s meeting, please go to: http://www.ashg.org/2012meeting.

World Health Summit

The World Health Summit is one of the world’s foremost gatherings of leaders from academia, politics, industry and civil society to develop joint strategies and take action to address key challenges in medical research, global health and health care delivery with the aim of shaping the political, academic and social agendas. This year´s World Health Summit “Research for Health and Sustainable Development” will be held in Berlin from October 21st to 24th, 2012.

The M8 Alliance of Academic Health Centres and Medical Universities was officially founded in 2009, as a medical and scientific forum of excellence on the occasion of the 1st World Health Summit in Berlin. It is composed of a network of prestigious medical institutions dealing with scientific, political, and economic issues related to medicine and global health. The M8 Alliance acts as a permanent platform for framing future considerations of global medical development and health challenges. It is the M8’s vision to harness academic excellence to improve global health.

Summit’s main themes:

“Research for Health and Sustainable Development”

Educating Health Professionals
• Brain Drain in Medical Professions
• Educating Health Professionals for the 21st Century

Translating Research into Policy
• Integrating Research into Health Policies and Health Systems
• Minimizing Waste of Research
• Translating Genomic Research into Global Health Gains

Financing Health
• Economic Crisis and Health Impact
• Sustainable Health Systems Financing and Universal Coverage

Diseases of Modern Environments
• The Epidemic of Chronic Diseases
• The Future of Maternal and Reproductive Health
• Urban Development and Mental Health

Summit Organizer

K.I.T. Group GmbH
Association & Conference Management
Kurfürstendamm 71
10709 Berlin
Germany

Sophie Spangenberger
Organizing Manager
Tel.: +49 30 246 03 240
Fax: +49 30 246 03 200
sophie.spangenberger@worldhealthsummit.org

Dynamics of Preparedness Conference

October 22-24, 2012 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The University of Pittsburgh MIDAS National Center of Excellence, in cooperation with the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice and the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, invite researchers, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows to the Dynamics of Preparedness Conference in Pittsburgh, October 22–24, 2012.

Purpose: The past decade has seen unprecedented investments in research on preparedness from many sectors of government and the private sector. Numerous reports have appeared, evaluating the preparedness status of states and communities. Dynamics of Preparedness will convene researchers from diverse disciplines to present, critique, and consider the future of research on emergency preparedness in public health systems.

Dynamics describes the complex interactivity among numerous governmental, private, and voluntary components of public health systems. Systems must adapt to emergencies and disasters —both as individuals, agencies, and organizations and as system components affecting the populations served—in ways that often produce unexpected, secondary impacts. Preparedness includes prevention, mitigation, response, and recovery relevant to infectious disease outbreaks as well as other emergencies and disasters.

Goals:

Compile research on public health systems that support preparedness, specifically highlighting innovative methods and novel approaches.
Critique the rigor and quality of output from this research arena, noting the findings and insights with implications for public policy and practical application.
Catalogue the issues and problems where the evidence base for preparedness policy and practice remains weak as an agenda for future research and seek solution-focused innovations.

Dynamics of Preparedness will feature sessions in:

Data: resources for, as well as barriers and constraints upon, quantitative and qualitative research

Innovations: methodological challenges and novel multi-disciplinary approaches

Outcomes: demonstrations, observational studies, and comparisons focused on the outcomes of response to public health emergencies

Modeling: use of computational, conceptual, and mathematical modeling to explore legal frameworks, resource deployment, and operational efficiency and effectiveness under resource-constrained conditions

Progress of Research: presentation of studies on the critical themes of system sustainability, communications, workforce capabilities, and criteria and metrics and on the cross-cutting issues of legal infrastructure and special-needs populations

Translation: utility and application of research results for policy making and practice

1st International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications

Held in conjuction with JCDL 2012 (ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries).

June 14, 2012 - Washington, DC

Digital libraries that store scientific publications are becoming increasingly central to the research process. They are not only used for traditional tasks, such as finding and storing research outputs, but also as a source for discovering new research trends or evaluating research excellence. With the current growth of scientific publications deposited in digital libraries, it is no longer sufficient to provide only access to content. To aid research it is especially important to improve the process of how research is being done.

The recent development in natural language processing, information retrieval and the semantic web make it possible to transform the way we work with scientific publications. However, in order to be able to improve these technologies and carry out experiments, researchers need to be able to easily access and use large databases of scientific publications.

This workshop aims to bring together people from different backgrounds who:

(a) are interested in analysing and mining databases of scientific publications,
(b) develop systems that enable such analysis and mining of scientific databases or
(c) who develop novel technologies that improve the way research is being done.

TOPICS

The topics of the workshop will be organised around the following three themes:

Infrastructures, systems, datasets or APIs that enable analysis of large volumes of scientific publications.
Semantic enrichment of scientific publications by means of text-mining, crowdsourcing or other methods.
Analysis of large databases of scientific publications to identify research trends, high impact, cross-fertilisation between disciplines, research excellence etc.

Topics of interest relevant to theme 1 include, but are not limited to:

Systems, services, datasets or APIs for accessing scientific publications and/or research data. The existence of datasets, services, systems and APIs (in particular those that are open) providing access to large volumes of scientific publications and their metadata is an essential prerequisite for being able to research and develop new technologies that can transform the way people do research. We invite papers presenting new systems, services, APIs or datasets that enable people to access databases of scientific publications and carry out their analysis. Papers addressing Open Access are of a special interest. We also invite papers that discuss issues and current challenges in design of these systems or address the issues of accessing and managing scientific publications and/or research datasets.

Topics of interest relevant to theme 2 include, but are not limited to:

Novel information extraction and text-mining approaches to semantic enrichment of publications. This might range from mining publication structure, such as title, abstract, authors, citation information etc. to more challenging tasks, such as extracting names of applied methods, research questions (or scientific gaps), identifying parts of the scholarly discourse structure etc.

Automatic categorization and clustering of scientific publications. Methods that can automatically categorize publications according to an established subject-based classification/taxonomy (such as Library of Congress classification, UNESCO thesaurus, DOAJ subject classification, Library of Congress Subject Headings) are of particular interest. Other approaches might involve automatic clustering or classification of research publications according to various criteria.

New methods and models for connecting and interlinking scientific publications. Scientific publications in digital libraries are not isolated islands. Connecting publications using explicitly defined citations is very restrictive and has many disadvantages. We are interested in innovative technologies that can automatically connect and interlink publications or parts of publications, according to various criteria, such as semantic similarity, contradiction, argument support or other relationship types.

Models for semantically representing and annotating publications. This topic is related to aspects of semantically modeling publications and scholarly discourse. Models that are practical with respect to the state-of-the-art in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies are of special interest.
Semantically enriching/annotating publications by crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing can be used in innovative ways to annotate publications with richer metadata or to approve/disapprove annotations created using text-mining or other approaches. We welcome papers that address the following questions: (a) what incentives should be provided to motivate users in contributing metadata, (b) how to apply crowdsourcing in the specialized domains of scientific publications, (c) what tasks in the domain of organising scientific publications is crowdsourcing suitable for and where it might fail, (d) other relevant crowdsourcing topics relevant to the domain of scientific publications.

Topics of interest relevant to theme 3 include, but are not limited to:

New methods, models and innovative approaches for measuring impact of publications. The most widely used metrics for measuring impact are based on citations. However, counting citations does not take into account the publication content and the qualitative nature of the citation. In addition, there is a delay between the publication and the measurable impact in citations. We in particular encourage papers addressing new ways of evaluating publications’ impact beyond standard citation measures.

New methods for measuring performance of researchers. Methods for assessing impact of a publication can often be extended to methods that can assess the impact of individual researchers. However, there are also other criteria for measuring impact in addition to publications, such as the development and publication of research data, economical and market impact, that should also be taken into account. We welcome papers addressing these aspects.

New methods for measuring impact of research groups. The same as for impact of individual researchers holds for research communities.
Methods for identifying research trends and cross-fertilization between research disciplines. Identifying research trends should allow discovering newly emerging disciplines or it should help to explain why certain fields are attracting the attention of a wider research community. Such monitoring is important for research funders and governments in order to be able to quickly respond to new developments. We invite papers discussing new methods for identifying trends and cross-fertilization between research disciplines using methods ranging from social network analysis and text- and data-mining to innovative visualization approaches.

Application of mining from scientific databases. New methods and models developed for mining from scientific publications can be applied in many different scenarios, such as improving access to scientific publications, providing exploratory search in digital collections, identifying experts. We encourage papers describing innovative approaches that use scientific publications and data to solve real-world problems.

EXPECTED AUDIENCE

The workshop on Mining Scientific Publications aims to bring together researchers, digital library developers and practitioners from government and industry to address the current challenges in the domain of mining scientific publications.