News

The Eighth International Annual Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2004), sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (ACM-SIGACT) will be organized by University of California San Diego, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the International Society for Computational Biology in San Diego, CA on March 27-31, 2004. The conference will be held at the Westin Hotel Horton Plaza, San Diego.

RECOMB 2004 will provide a general forum for disseminating the latest research in bioinformatics and computational biology. It is a multidisciplinary conference that brings together academic and industrial scientists from molecular biology, medicine, computer science, mathematics and statistics. SDSC's Director of Integrative Biosciences, Philip E. Bourne, will serve as conference general chair and Dan Gusfield of the University of California, Davis is the meeting's program chair.

The conference program will include between 30 and 40 contributed papers that are selected by an international program committee through a rigorous review process that rivals the editorial process for top-rate scientific journals. In previous years, paper selection has been made from up to 130 submissions from over a dozen countries. Ten page extended abstracts of the contributed papers are collected in a volume published by ACM Press and available at the conference. Full versions of a selection of the papers are published annually in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Biology devoted to the RECOMB Conference.

Another highlight of RECOMB is a collection of nine keynotes awarded to an international group of top researchers who are asked to inform the community about landmark advances in computational and experimental research and inject new directions into the field of computational molecular biology.

• Carlos Bustamante, University of California Berkeley,

• 2004 Award Recipient: The Distinguished New Technologies Lecture
  

• Russell Doolittle, University of California, San Diego, 2004 Award Recipient:

• The Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Computational Biology Lecture
  

• Andrew Fire, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 2004 Award Recipient: The

• Distinguished Biology Lecture
  

• Richard Karp, University of California Berkeley, 2004 Award Recipient: Fred

• Howes Distinguished Service Award
  

• William McGinnis, University of California San Diego
  

• Deborah Nickerson, University of Washington
  

• Martin Nowak, Harvard University
  

• Christine Orengo, University College London
  

• Elizabeth Winzeler, Scripps Research Institute

RECOMB originated in the mathematical and computational side of the computational biology, and the meeting still has a theme related to computational advances. However, the effective use of computational techniques to biological innovation is also an important aspect of the conference. In previous years, the number of attendees has topped 500, and 600 attendees are expected in 2004. For more information, please visit http://recomb04.sdsc.edu/.