4th International Workshop on Machine Learning in Systems Biology

Molecular biology and all the biomedical sciences are undergoing a true revolution as a result of the emergence and growing impact of a series of new disciplines/tools sharing the "-omics" suffix in their name. These include in particular genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, devoted respectively to the examination of the entire systems of genes, transcripts, proteins and metabolites present in a given cell or tissue type.

The availability of these new, highly effective tools for biological exploration is dramatically changing the way one performs research in at least two respects. First, the amount of available experimental data is not a limiting factor any more; on the contrary, there is a plethora of it. Given the research question, the challenge has shifted towards identifying the relevant pieces of information and making sense out of it (a "data mining" issue). Second, rather than focus on components in isolation, we can now try to understand how biological systems behave as a result of the integration and interaction between the individual components that one can now monitor simultaneously (so called "systems biology").

Taking advantage of this wealth of "genomic" information has become a conditio sine qua non for whoever ambitions to remain competitive in molecular biology and in the biomedical sciences in general. Machine learning naturally appears as one of the main drivers of progress in this context, where most of the targets of interest deal with complex structured objects: sequences, 2D and 3D structures or interaction networks. At the same time bioinformatics and systems biology have already induced significant new developments of general interest in machine learning, for example in the context of learning with structured data, graph inference, semi-supervised learning, system identification, and novel combinations of optimization and learning algorithms.

Molecular biology and all the biomedical sciences are undergoing a true revolution as a result of the emergence and growing impact of a series of new disciplines/tools sharing the "-omics" suffix in their name. These include in particular genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, devoted respectively to the examination of the entire systems of genes, transcripts, proteins and metabolites present in a given cell or tissue type.

Scientific Program Committee

• Nigel Burroughs (University of Warwick, UK)
• Theo Damoulas (Cornell University, USA)
• Werner Dubitzky (University of Ulster, UK)
• Sašo Džeroski (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
• Pierre Geurts (University of Liège, Belgium)
• Dirk Husmeier (Biomathematics & Statistics Scotland, UK)
• Samuel Kaski (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland)
• Ross King (Aberystwyth University, UK)
• Elena Marchiori (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Sach Mukherjee (University of Warwick, UK)
• Mahesan Niranjan (University of Southampton, UK)
• John Pinney (Imperial College London , UK)
  Magnus Rattray (University of Manchester, UK)
• Simon Rogers (University of Glasgow, UK)
• Juho Rousu (University of Helsinki, Finland)
• Céline Rouveirol (University of Paris XIII, France)
• Yvan Saeys (University of Gent, Belgium)
• Guido Sanguinetti (University of Sheffield/University of Edinburgh, UK)
• Ljupco Todorovski (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
• Koji Tsuda (Max Planck Institute, Tuebingen)
• Jean-Philippe Vert (Ecole des Mines, France)
• Jean-Daniel Zucker (University of Paris XIII, France)
• Blaz Zupan (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)