CIBB 2021: the 17th International Conference on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (online)

Deadlines

Special session & tutorial proposal submission: 31 July 2021
Short paper submission: 15 September 2021
Late short paper submission: 25 September 2021
Acceptance/rejection notification: 18 October 2021
Camera-ready article submission: 2 November 2021
Conference: 15-17 November 2021

If you plan to submit an article and need special arrangements regarding the dates, please write us an email at cibb2021(AT)protonmail.com

Call for short papers

The main goal of the CIBB international conference is to provide a multi-disciplinary forum open to researchers interested in the application of computational intelligence, in a broad sense, to open problems in bioinformatics, computational biology, biostatistics, systems and synthetic biology and medical informatics. Cutting-edge methodologies capable of accelerating life science discoveries will be the main focus of the conference, together with data mining technologies applied to real-life scenarios in biology and health. Following its tradition and roots, this year's meeting will gather researchers and practitioners from the international scientific community interested in advancements and future perspectives in bioinformatics and biostatistics. Moreover, looking at current trends and future opportunities at the edge of computer and life sciences, the application of computational intelligence to system and synthetic biology, and the consequent impact on innovative medicine will be of great interest for the participants. Theoretical and experimental biologists are also invited to participate in order to present novel challenges and foster multidisciplinary collaboration.

The scientific program of CIBB 2021 will include keynote speakers, tutorials, and special sessions. Contributed papers will be presented in plenary oral sessions, and special sessions. The CIBB 2021 conference will be an online event. This call for papers invites researchers to submit a short paper (4–6 pages) that will go through a peer review and, if accepted, will be presented at the conference. After the conference, the authors of all the accepted short papers presented at the conference will be invited to submit an extended version of their manuscripts to the conference proceedings book in Springer Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI) or to a journal supplement in BMC Bioinformatics or BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

Topics of interest include:

Machine learning applications to bioinformatics or health datasets
Data mining methods in biomedical contexts
Next generation sequencing bioalgorithms
Multi-omics data analysis
High dimensional statistical analysis of omics data
Algorithms for alternative splicing analysis
Algorithms for molecular evolution and phylogenetic analysis
Methods for the visualization of high dimensional complex omic data
Software tools for bioinformatics
Methods for comparative genomics
Computational tools applied to proteomics
Methods for functional classification of genes
Methods for unsupervised analysis, validation and visualization of structures discovered in bio-molecular data
Health-Informatics and Medical Informatics
Biomedical and Microscopy Imaging
Methods for the integration of clinical and genetic data
Heterogeneous data integration and data fusion for diagnostics
Algorithms for pharmacogenomics
Biomedical text mining
Methods for diagnosis and prognosis within personalized medicine
Statistical methods for the analysis of clinical data
Prediction of secondary and tertiary protein structures
Advanced pathway enrichment analysis methods
Mass spectrometry data analysis in proteomics
Algorithms for molecular evolution and phylogenetic analysis
Bio-molecular databases and data mining
Mathematical modeling and automated reasoning on biological and synthetic systems
Computational simulation of biological systems
Methods and advances in systems biology
Spatio-temporal analysis of synthetic and biological systems
Network systems biology
Models for cell populations and tissues
Methods for the engineering of synthetic components
Modelling and engineering of interacting synthetic and biological systems
Software tools for bioinformatics, biostatistics, systems and synthetic biology

Advice on how to write scientific papers

Authors might consider reading the following scientific articles of the preeminent PLOS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules collection before writing and structuring their papers for CIBB 2021:
   Ten simple rules for getting published, Philip E. Bourne, PLOS Computational Biology 1(5): e57, 2005.
   Ten simple rules for structuring papers, Brett Mensh, and Konrad Kording, PLOS Computational Biology 13(9): e1005619, 2017.
   Ten simple (empirical) rules for writing science, Cody J. Weinberger, James A. Evans, and Stefano Allesina, PLOS Computational Biology 11(4): e1004205, 2015.
   Ten simple rules for writing research papers, Weixiong Zhang, PLOS Computational Biology 10(1): e1003453, 2014.
   Ten simple rules for writing algorithmic bioinformatics conference papers, Paul Medvedev, PLOS Computational Biology 16(4): e1007742, 2020.

Submission of short papers

Prospective authors should submit short papers prepared according to the following instructions:

The short papers should be submitted in PDF format (this is the only accepted format).
The short papers length should be at least 4 pages and should not exceed 6 pages in total, on single column, single-spaced text.
The short papers should be written in British English or North American English. Please perform a grammar spell-check and correct any typos or mistakes before the submission.
The short papers should include 10 references, at most.

We warmly recommend the use of the provided templates available for LaTeX (preferred), LibreOffice Writer, and Microsoft Word. The LaTeX template is also available for free on Overleaf.com

Short papers should adhere, as much as appropriate, to the following structure and sections:

Scientific background
Data and methods
Results
Conclusions
References (maximum 10)

The authors can submit their short papers to CIBB 2021 only through EasyChair.

Authors of accepted short papers are enrcouraged to post software code under an open free software license online on GitHub, GitLab, or SourceForge and their dataset, if authorized, on public repositories such as FigShare, Zenodo, Kaggle, or University of California Irvine Machine Learning Repository.

Authors of accepted short papers are enrcouraged to post their short papers on preprint servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv.

Authorship

When deciding which author names to include in their articles and in which order, the CIBB authors should follow the authorship guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), as explained by the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine.

Post-conference publication

At least one author of an accepted paper is required to register and present the paper at the conference.
The authors of all the accepted short papers (both of the main track and of the special sessions) will be invited to submit an extended version of their work to the post-conference monograph or supplements. We plan to invite all the papers for a volume in the Springer series of Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI), or to a supplement of an international scientific journal (such as BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Medical Informatics, as in the latest editions). Please see the past editions webpage to find the books of the proceedings and supplements of the past editions of the conference to get a sense of them.

Call for tutorials and special sessions

CIBB 2021 will run a number of tutorials and special sessions. Any topic of interest for the conference is eligible for a tutorial. Tutorials typically last from one to three hours. Special sessions focus on a specific, possibly cutting-edge topic of interest for the CIBB audience. special session organizers will be responsible for call dissemination, the reviewing process and organizing oral presentations. Typically, a special session will have around 5 accepted papers and might have an invited speaker.

Tutorial proposals should include title, a one-page-long abstract, and short biography of presenters. Tutorial proposals are due ~~15 July 2021~~ 31 July 2021, and should be sent via email to the conference chairs at cibb2021(AT)protonmail.com

Special Session proposals should include the session's title and scope, short biography of the session chairs, and name of the main corresponding organizer. Special session proposals are due ~~15 July 2021~~ 31 July 2021. Proposals of special sessions will be evaluated as soon as they are submitted. An approved special session can happen if it has at least 3 short papers accepted; if not, the accepted papers are included in the conference main track.
If the special session organizers want to propose an invited speaker for their special session, they have to propose someone who must have published a very impactful scientific article about CIBB-related topics in a peer-reviewed journal as first author or corresponding author in the last three years. Special session proposals should be sent via email to the conference chairs at cibb2021(AT)protonmail.com
Feel free to check the special sessions of CIBB 2019 to get a sense of what is expected for a special session proposal.