Scientific Communication meetings & conferences

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.

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.

Third Annual VIVO conference

August 22-24, 2012 Miami, Florida

This three-day 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.

The VIVO conference is an excellent opportunity to meet with VIVO team members from participating institutions, and offers an open and collaborative environment to share ideas and discuss topics related to adoption and implementation of VIVO, VIVO-based tools and the opportunities created by advancing data sharing and team science.

Who should attend?

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

Conference Highlights

The conference begins with a full day of workshops for those new to VIVO, those implementing VIVO and those wishing to develop applications using VIVO.

Keynote addresses, invited speakers, scientific panels, contributed papers and posters will cover a range of topics, including the semantic web, linked open data, VIVO sustainability, adopting and implementing VIVO, research networking, network visualization, ontology and the role of VIVO in support of team science.

Fifth International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM 2012)

September 3rd and 4th, 2012 Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland

The 5th International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM) 3rd-4th September, 2012 will be held at the Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Support is provided by the projects SASEBio/OntoGene (SNF105315_130558/1) and MANTRA (EU FP7).

SMBM 2012 aims to bring together researchers from text and data mining in biomedicine, medical, bio- and chemoinformatics, and researchers from biomedical ontology design and engineering.

SMBM 2012 is the follow-up event of SMBM 2010 (EBI, U.K.), SMBM 2008 (University of Turku, Finland), SMBM 2006 (University of Jena, Germany), and SMBM 2005 (EBI, U.K.).

Selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS).

[contact the organization committee via smbmzurich @ gmail.com]

DataRes Symposium

A half-day open conference, the DataRes Symposium will provide a forum for peer-reviewed papers and discussion concerning the future of research data management in the LIS field. The symposium will be held on Monday, December 10th, 2012 in Washington D.C., as a pre-conference to the December CNI Membership Meeting.

Third Workshop on Building and Evaluating Resources for Biomedical Text Mining (BioTxtM 2012)

May 26, 2012 Istanbul Turkey

Over the past decade, biomedical text mining has received a large amount of interest. Faced with the rapidly increasing volume of biomedical literature, domain experts have an ever-increasing need for tools that can help them locate isolate relevant nuggets of information from this deluge of information in a timely and efficient manner. The response to such issues by the natural language processing community can be clearly evidenced in the biomedical natural language processing workshops that have been held over that past 10 years, in conjunction with ACL or NAACL meetings, to report the process in the field, as well as the founding of an ACL special interest group.

Biomedical text mining applications are reliant on high quality resources. These include databases and ontologies (e.g., Biothesaurus, UMLS Metathesaurus, MeSH and the Gene Ontology) and dictionaries/computational lexicons (e.g., the BioLexicon and the UMLS SPECIALIST lexicon). Recent years have also evidenced a large increase in the number of freely-available corpora (e.g., GENIA, GREC, AIMED, BioInfer, CRAFT, BioDRB) annotated with an expanding range of information types. These now include not only named entities and simple relations that hold between them, but also more complex event structures and coreference, as well as higher level information about how events are to be interpreted (e.g., facts, analyses, speculations, etc.) and discourse structure. Community shared tasks and challenges (e.g., JNLPBA, LL05, Biocreative I/II/III, BioNLP'09, BioNLP 2011, i2b2, etc.) also normally involve the production of annotated corpora (on which the participating systems are trained and evaluated) as well as helping to steer research efforts to focus on open research problems.

Following on from the success of two previous workshops, the workshop aims to bring together researchers who make use of biomedical text mining resources such as the above in their applications, or who are working on the development of new resources. The workshop will allow an assessment of the current state of the art of resources, and will provide a forum for the discussion of current problems, questions and open issues, which will be useful in guiding further research in this area. Such topics are very much relevant to META-NET (a Network of Excellence consisting of 54 research centres from 33 countries), which is dedicated to building the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. META-NET aims to push forward research to allow a rapid expansion of language technologies; such efforts can only be acheived if appropriate resources are available. Since META-NET is concerned with enhancing information access for all European citizens, submissions concerning biomedical resources for languages other than English are particularly welcome. A further vital consideration to allow rapid building of new applications is that of interoperability and reuse. As a step towards this, several annotated corpora have been made UIMA-compliant, and are available in the U-Compare system, which allows easy construction of NLP workfows and evaluation against gold standard corpora.

Some specific questions that the workshop will aim to answer include the following:

Among the available resources, which are the most used? What makes a good resource? How can easily can resources be employed for different purposes? What efforts have been made to make resources reusable or interoperable? To what extent have these efforts been successful?
Which resources are underused and why? What could be done to improve or extend them to improve their utility?
Which types of resources are still lacking and what is needed urgently? Are any resources planned or in development to address such gaps? Are any resources available that cover languages other than English?
To what extent do the existing resources support processing of text in different biomedical subdomains? How easily can they be adapted to deal with different domains?

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Building biomedical resources: controlled vocabularies, terminologies, ontologies, corpora
Guidelines and annotation schemas, tools, challenges, interoperability
Reengineering existing biomedical or general language resources
Update, evolution, extension or enrichment of resources
Adapting resources to new sub-domains
Interoperability of resources and standards
Lightly annotated and noisy resources
Tools for exploration of resources
Data exchange formats
Evaluation, comparison and critical assessment of resources / evaluation metrics
Test suites

Workshop Contact Person
For any queries, please contact:

Paul.Thompson (at) manchester.ac.uk
National Centre for Text Mining, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK

International Conference on Science Communication

4th to 7th September 2012 Nancy (France)

Don’t miss the 2012 edition of the International Conference on Science Communication, "Les journées Hubert Curien" which will take place in Nancy from the 3rd to the 7th September 2012. Whether you work in the fields of culture and science communication, or you are a coordinator, a researcher, a post-graduate student, send us your contact details for information on the organisation of the conference.

Theme of the 2012 conference: "Science Communication: International Perspectives, Issues and Strategies"

Universities and research organisations are vibrant communities fully engaged in science communication. Their actions are all the more important because the relationship between science, technology and society at large is at the heart of current debate, particularly at a time when the rapid expansion of digital technology opens up uncountable modes of interaction between producers and users of information. This conference intends to take a closer look at the new forms of dialogue between those who are directly involved in the production of knowledge and those for whom ethical, political and economic questions linked to research and its outcomes are considered just as important as the progress of knowledge.

Official languages: French, English.

Themes
Five strands of investigation to explore new horizons:

· The characteristics of science communication in universities and research centres
· Public policy with regard to science communication
· Collaborative work and partnership
· Target audiences for science communication
· New tools, new practices

Contact
Kateřina Picková

CST Project Manager
University of Lorraine
34, Cours Léopold
54000 Nancy - FRANCE

00 33 3 54 50 54 75
jhc2012@nancy-universite.fr

MedicReS World Congress World Congress on Good Medical Research

June 6-9, 2012 Vienna, Austria

Clinical Trials, Translational Research, Epidemiological Studies, Animal Experiments

good planning* good analyzing* good reporting* good reviewing* good publishing for authors, reviewers, editors, publishers

We would like to invite you to join to 'MedicReS World Congress’ that is to be held on June 6-9, 2012 in Vienna Austria.

Main Sessions (time:1.5 hours) 5 Speakers

1 Invited Speaker (20’+10’) & 4 Selected Speakers (10’+5’)

Main Session1 “Ethics”

Main Session2 “Clinical & Statistical Significance for Creating Good Evidence”

Main Session3 “Good Planning”

Main Session4 “Good Analyzing”

Main Session5 “Good Reporting”

Main Session6 “Good Reviewing”

Main Session7 “Good Editing”

Main Session8 “ Good Publishing”

Sub Sessions (time:1.5 hours) 5 Speakers

1 Invited Speaker (20’+10’) & Contributed Speakers (10’+5’)

Contributed Session1 “Ethical Issues in Clinical and Translational Research”

Contributed Session2 “Ethical Issues in Animal Experiments”

Contributed Session3 “Ethical Issues in Biostatistics”

Contributed Session4 “Study Design for Translational Research"

Contributed Session5 “Study Design for Diagnostic Studies"

Contributed Session6 “Study Design for Animal Experiments"

Contributed Session7 “Analyzing Treatment Efficiency”

Contributed Session8 “Analyzing Cost-Effectiveness”

Contributed Session9 "Statistical Applications in Genetics"

Contributed Session10 “Data Analyze in Animal Experiments”

Contributed Session11 “ Medical Decision Making Tools”

Contributed Session12 " Data Reliability & Validity Analyze"

Conference Organization

SBB Consulting GmbH
Mariahilfer Strasse 123/3
1060 Vienna
AUSTRIA
ic2012@medicres.org

ICBO 2012: 3rd International Conference on Biomedical Ontology

July 22-25, 2012 Medical University of Graz, Austria

Ontologies are increasingly used in biology and medicine, and their use in annotation of both clinical and experimental data is now common technique in integrative translational research. They are being developed for the description of biological and biomedical phenomena. To be maximally effective, such ontologies must work well together. As ontologies become more commonly used, the problems involved in achieving coordination in ontology development become ever more urgent. This conference addresses these problems. It brings together representatives of all major communities involved in the development and application of ontologies in biomedicical research, health care, and related areas. In addition to papers, the conference will feature workshops and tutorials, as well as software demonstrations and a doctoral symposium.

ICBO 2012 is collocated with FOIS 2012, the seventh Conference on Formal Ontologies in Information Systems. This conference series focuses on the systematization and elaboration of ontologies and associated reasoning techniques. The discipline of formal ontology is now applied to such diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the Semantic Web. FOIS is intended to gather researchers with an interest in formal ontology, where both theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in an interdisciplinary spirit.

Local Organizer

Stefan Schulz
Institute for Medical
Informatics, Statistics
and Documentation
Medical University of Graz
Auenbruggerplatz 2
8036 Graz, Austria

Email:
stefan.schulz [at] medunigraz.at

Conference on Science and the Internet 2012

Düsseldorf, Germany August 1-3, 2012

Online media have brought about numerous changes in scholarly practices, including, but not limited to gathering data, finding relevant literature, making research and results accessible, organising collaboration, communicating with colleagues and students as well as creating fruitful learning environments.

The interdisciplinary conference “Science and the Internet”, to be held August 1-3, 2012 in Düsseldorf, brings together researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines (e.g. information science, computer science, sociology, communication and media studies, linguistics, educations studies, legal studies, etc.) working on the following or related issues:

How is the research process transformed through the use of digital infrastructures?

How can the challenges of the public availability of (large scale) scientific data be met?

How do scholars make use of social networking platforms, (micro-)blogs, wikis, or websites?

How does the Internet affect scholarly publishing (e.g. Open Access, unpublished manuscripts, blogs)?

How has the Internet changed the practice and relevance of citations and of receiving reputation?

How do teaching styles or beliefs and use of the Internet mutually influence each other?

Do Web 2.0 platforms offer opportunities to advance public understanding of science?

What is the role of ethics, policies, and legal regulation in academic use of the Internet?

What theoretical and practical implications do the aforementioned considerations have for science and the Internet?