Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) is an annual academic conference on the subjects of bioinformatics and computational biology organised by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). The principal focus of the conference is on the development and application of advanced computational methods for biological problems. The conference has been held every year since 1993 and has grown to become one of the largest and most prestigious meetings in these fields, hosting over 2,000 delegates in 2004. [1] [2] From the first meeting, ISMB has been held in locations worldwide; since 2007, meetings have been located in Europe and North America in alternating years. Since 2004, European meetings have been held jointly with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB).
The main ISMB conference is usually held over three days and consists of presentations, poster sessions and keynote talks. Most presentations are given in multiple parallel tracks; however, keynote talks are presented in a single track and are chosen to reflect outstanding research in bioinformatics. Notable ISMB keynote speakers have included eight Nobel laureates. The recipients of the ISCB Overton Prize and ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award are invited to give keynote talks as part of the programme. The proceedings of the conference are currently published by the journal Bioinformatics .
The origins of the ISMB conference lie in a workshop for artificial intelligence researchers with an interest in molecular biology held in November 1991. [3] The workshop was organised by American researcher Lawrence Hunter, then director of the Machine Learning Project at the United States National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland. [4] A subsequent workshop on the same topic held in 1992, hosted by the NLM and the National Science Foundation, made it clear that a regular international conference for the field was required. Such a conference would be dedicated to molecular biology as a rapidly emerging application of artificial intelligence. [5] Having successfully applied for grants from AAAI, NIH and the Department of Energy Office of Health and Environmental Research, the first ISMB conference was held in July 1993, at the NLM. The conference was chaired by Hunter, David Searls (research associate professor at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine) and Jude Shavlik (assistant professor of computer science at University of Wisconsin–Madison) and attracted over 200 attendees from 13 countries, [4] submitting 69 scientific papers. [3]
The success of the first conference prompted the announcement of a second ISMB conference at the end of the meeting. ISMB 1994 was initially planned to be held in Seattle. However, a competing meeting forced ISMB to change venues at short notice. The conference was held at Stanford University in August 1994 and was organised by Russ Altman, a research scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine. [3] To emphasise the international aspect of the conference, ISMB 1995 was held at Robinson College, Cambridge. ISMB 1995 also marked a shift in the focus of the conference. ISCB Board member and Director of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute Alfonso Valencia has stated that, in 1995, "the conference changed from a computer science-based conference to a point where everyone realized that, if you want to make progress, there has to be more focus in biology." [3]
ISMB 1997 was held in Halkidiki, Greece and marked the foundation of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). [5] ISCB was formed with a focus on managing all scientific, organizational and financial aspects of the ISMB conference and to provide a forum for scientists to address the emerging role of computers in the biological sciences. ISCB has assisted in organising the ISMB conference series since 1998. [2] The period following the formation of ISCB also marked an expansion in the number of ISMB attendees: ISMB 2000 (held at the University of California, San Diego) was attended by over 1,000 delegates, [1] submitting 141 scientific papers. [3] This meeting was also the last time ISMB would be held at a university, due to size limitations. [1]
In 2004, ISMB was jointly held with the European Conference on Computational Biology for the first time. The conference was also co-located with the Genes, Proteins and Computers conference. This meeting, held in Glasgow, UK, was the largest bioinformatics conference ever held, [6] attended by 2,136 delegates, submitting 496 scientific papers. [7] Alfonso Valencia considers ISMB/ECCB 2004 to be an important milestone in the history of ISMB: "it was the first one where the balance between Europe and the States became an important part of the conference. It was here that we established the rules and the ways and the spirit of collaboration between the Americans and the Europeans." [3] The success of the joint conference paved the way for future European ISMB meetings to be held jointly with ECCB. [3]
By the end of 2006, ISCB was in financial difficulty. Two conferences (ISMB 2003, in Brisbane and ISMB 2006, in Fortaleza) had drastically reduced numbers of participants due to their location, with a corresponding reduction in income. [8] To allow more delegates to attend, it was decided to limit conference locations to North America and Europe. In January 2007, ISMB and ECCB agreed to hold joint conferences in Europe every other year, beginning with ISMB/ECCB 2007. [2] ISMB would be held in North America in the years between joint meetings. As of 2016 [update] , this pattern has been confirmed to continue until at least 2019. ISMB/ECCB 2007 (held in Vienna, Austria) marked the first conference for which ISCB took full responsibility for organising. [1] Vienna became the first city to host ISMB twice with ISMB/ECCB 2011. This 'return visit' was an experiment intended to reduce the increasing effort required to find suitable conference venues. Although the return to Vienna was only deemed partially successful due to price increases, Boston (which hosted ISMB 2010 and 2014) is predicted to become a 'safe' site which ISMB can periodically return to. [1]
ISMB celebrated its 20th meeting with ISMB 2012, held in Long Beach, California. This event attracted around 1,600 delegates, [1] submitting 268 scientific papers. [3] Richard H. Lathrop and Lawrence Hunter presented a special keynote presentation, looking back at previous ISMB meetings and attempting to predict where the field of bioinformatics may head in the future. [9] ISMB/ECCB 2013 was held in Berlin, Germany and was attended by around 2,000 delegates, submitting 233 scientific papers. [10]
The main ISMB conference is usually held over three days and consists of presentations, poster sessions and keynote talks. [1]
Academic papers at ISMB were traditionally presented in a single track. [3] Presentations at ISMB 1994 were split further into three themed days, focusing on protein secondary structure prediction, sequence analysis and AI techniques and biochemical applications, respectively. [4] As attendance at ISMB increased, the single track approach became increasingly unsustainable and two parallel tracks were introduced at ISMB/ECCB 2004. Further expansion meant that, by ISMB 2012, over 200 talks were presented in nine parallel tracks [1] including multiple proceedings tracks, a highlights track and a technology track. The introduction of parallel tracks to ISMB was controversial. Christopher Rawlings (head of Computational and Systems Biology at Rothamsted Research and organiser of ISMB 1995) has said: "There were a lot of people who wanted to keep it more strongly in the AI intelligent systems model and have a meeting where everybody would go to everything. But it just grew too big. We just couldn’t." [3] As the number of submitted proceedings papers has increased, the acceptance rate has decreased dramatically, from 75% in 1994 to 13% in 2012. [3] ISMB proceedings from 1993-2000 were published by AAAI Press. Since ISMB 2001, proceedings have been published in the journal Bioinformatics . [11] [12] The number of posters presented at ISMB has also increased dramatically. 25 posters were presented at ISMB 1994; [4] at recent ISMB meetings, 500–1,000 posters have been presented in multiple poster sessions. [1]
Keynote talks are presented in a single track and generally attract the largest audience. [2] These presentations are chosen to highlight outstanding research in the field of bioinformatics. Notable ISMB keynote speakers have included eight Nobel laureates: Richard J. Roberts (keynote speaker in 1994, 2006), John Sulston (1995), Manfred Eigen (1999), Gerald Edelman (2000), Sydney Brenner (2003), Kurt Wüthrich (2006), Robert Huber (2006) and Michael Levitt (2015). [5] [13] [14]
As of 2012, [update] ISMB runs on a budget in excess of $1.5M and, in terms of proceeds, brings in four times that of the other ISCB conferences (ISCB-Latin America, ISCB-Africa, ISCB-Asia, Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference, CSHALS and the Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference) combined. [1] Standard registration fees (as of 2013) are around $1,000 for academics who are ISCB members ($1,350 for non-members), with lower rates for students and higher rates for corporate delegates respectively. Discounts are provided for early registration. [15]
Pre-conference tutorials have played an important role in ISMB since the first conference. [2] Tutorials at ISMB 1994 included introductions to genetic algorithms, neural networks, AI for molecular biologists and molecular biology for computer scientists. [4] Tutorials on computational mass spectrometry-based proteomics and ENCODE data access were presented at ISMB/ECCB 2013. [16]
As attendance at ISMB grew in the late 1990s, several satellite meetings and special interest group (SIG) meetings formed alongside the main conference. SIG meetings are held over one or two days before the main conference and focus on a specific topic, allowing more detailed discussion than there would be time for in the main conference. [17] Notable SIG meetings include the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), which has been held annually since 2000 [18] and Bio-Ontologies, which has been held annually since 1998. [19] Satellite meetings are usually two days long and are held in conjunction with ISMB. The 12th CAMDA conference and the 9th 3DSIG meeting were held as satellite meetings of ISMB/ECCB 2013. [20] [21]
Conference | Location | Venue | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
ISMB 2024 | Montreal, Canada | Palais des congrès de Montréal | July 12–16 |
ISMB/ECCB 2025 | Liverpool, United Kingdom | July 20–24 | |
ISMB 2026 | Washington, D.C., United States | July 12–16 | |
ISMB/ECCB 2027 | TBD | ||
ISMB 2028 | Calgary, Alberta, Canada | July 23–27 |
The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference and has grown to become a larger society working towards advancing understanding of living systems through computation and for communicating scientific advances worldwide.
Bioinformatics is a biweekly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research and software in bioinformatics and computational biology. It is the official journal of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), together with PLOS Computational Biology. Authors can pay extra for open access and are allowed to self-archive after 1 year.
Lawrence E. Hunter is a Professor and Director of the Center for Computational Pharmacology and of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an internationally known scholar, focused on computational biology, knowledge-driven extraction of information from the primary biomedical literature, the semantic integration of knowledge resources in molecular biology, and the use of knowledge in the analysis of high-throughput data, as well as for his foundational work in computational biology, which led to the genesis of the major professional organization in the field and two international conferences.
The ISCB Overton Prize is a computational biology prize awarded annually for outstanding accomplishment by a scientist in the early to mid stage of his or her career. Laureates have made significant contribution to the field of computational biology either through research, education, service, or a combination of the three.
The ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award is an annual prize awarded by the International Society for Computational Biology for contributions to the field of computational biology.
The International Society for Computational Biology Student Council (ISCB-SC) is a dedicated section of the International Society for Computational Biology created in 2004. It is composed by students from all levels in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology. The organisation promotes the development of the students' community worldwide by organizing different events including symposia, workshops, webinars, internship coordination and hackathons. A special focus is made on the development of soft skills in order to develop potential in bioinformatics and computational biology students around the world.
The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) is a scientific meeting on the subjects of bioinformatics and computational biology. It covers a wide spectrum of disciplines, including bioinformatics, computational biology, genomics, computational structural biology, and systems biology. ECCB is organized annually in different European cities. Since 2007, the conference has been held jointly with Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) every second year. The conference also hosts the European ISCB Student Council Symposium. The proceedings of the conference are published by the journal Bioinformatics.
Burkhard Rost is a scientist leading the Department for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics at the Faculty of Informatics of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Rost chairs the Study Section Bioinformatics Munich involving the TUM and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) in Munich. From 2007-2014 Rost was President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) is an annual academic conference on the subjects of bioinformatics and computational biology. The conference has been held every year since 1997 and is a major international conference in computational biology, alongside the ISMB and ECCB conferences. The conference is affiliated with the International Society for Computational Biology. Since the first conference, authors of accepted proceedings papers have been invited to submit a revised version to a special issue of the Journal of Computational Biology.
David Sankoff is a Canadian mathematician, bioinformatician, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journal Language Variation and Change (Cambridge) and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals. Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and computational genomics. He is considered to be one of the founders of bioinformatics. In particular, he had a key role in introducing dynamic programming for sequence alignment and other problems in computational biology. In Pavel Pevzner's words, "Michael Waterman and David Sankoff are responsible for transforming bioinformatics from a ‘stamp collection' of ill-defined problems into a rigorous discipline with important biological applications."
Ron Shamir is an Israeli professor of computer science known for his work in graph theory and in computational biology. He holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics, and is the founder and former head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University.
Alfonso Valencia is a Spanish biologist, ICREA Professor, current director of the Life Sciences department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center., of Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB-ISCIII), and coordinator of the data pillar of the Spanish Personalised Medicine initiative, IMPaCT. From 2015-2018, he was President of the International Society for Computational Biology.
Gary Stormo is an American geneticist and currently Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He is considered one of the pioneers of bioinformatics and genomics. His research combines experimental and computational approaches in order to identify and predict regulatory sequences in DNA and RNA, and their contributions to the regulatory networks that control gene expression.
Ziv Bar-Joseph is an Israeli computational biologist and Professor in the Computational Biology Department and the Machine Learning Department at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.
The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is an academic conference on open-source programming and other open science practices in bioinformatics, organised by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. The conference has been held annually since 2000 and is run as a two-day meeting either within Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference or as a joint conference with the Galaxy community.
The ISCB Innovator Award is a computational biology prize awarded annually to leading scientists who are within two decades post-degree, who consistently make outstanding contributions to the field, and who continue to forge new directions. The prize was established by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2016 and is awarded at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference. The inaugural recipient was Serafim Batzoglou.
ISCB Fellowship is an award granted to scientists that the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) judges to have made “outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics”. As of 2019, there are 76 Fellows of the ISCB including Michael Ashburner, Alex Bateman, Bonnie Berger, Steven E. Brenner, Janet Kelso, Daphne Koller, Michael Levitt, Sarah Teichmann and Shoshana Wodak. See List of Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology for a comprehensive listing.
Mona Singh is an American computer scientist and an expert in computational molecular biology and bioinformatics. She is the Wang Family Professor in Computer Science in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Since 2021, she has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computational Biology.
Hanah Margalit is a Professor in the faculty of medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research combines bioinformatics, computational biology and systems biology, specifically in the fields of gene regulation in bacteria and eukaryotes.