Call for Workshop Proposals
2021 ACM-BCB Conference – August 1-4, 2021 (Virtual)

The 12^th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM-BCB) is the flagship conference of the ACM SIGBio. The 2021 ACM- BCB conference is the premier conference that is dedicated to interdisciplinary research linking computer science, mathematics, statistics, biology, medicine, bioinformatics, and biomedical and health informatics. ACM-BCB focuses on the grand challenges for life science, bioscience and human health by showcasing cutting-edge research on new technologies, methods, and tools around the processing, integration, analysis, mining, retrieval, and interpretation of biological, medical and health data with the aim of solving problems in life science, biomedical discovery, public and population health, disease prevention, and healthcare delivery. This conference and its posters, workshops, and tutorials collectively serve to showcase leading edge research focused on bioinformatics, computational biology, and health informatics.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference and all its associated events will be held virtually this year.

We invite authors to submit results that fall into general areas of bioinformatics, computational biology, and health informatics, including but not limited to the following:

• Sequence Analysis
• Genomic Variation and Disease
• Haplotypes and Population Genomics
• Protein and RNA Analysis, Structure, and Dynamics
• Phylogenetics
• Protein and RNA Analysis, Structure, and Dynamics
• Metagenomics and Algorithms for Microbiomes
• Cancer Genomics
• Pharmacogenomics
• Computational Systems Biology
• Computational Drug Discovery
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text Mining of Data in Bioinformatics, Biomedical, and Health Informatics
• Biological Modeling
• Imaging Genomics and Radiation Genomics
• Data Integration, Harmonization, and Ontology
• Deep Learning and AI for Bioinformatics, Medical Informatics, and Health Informatics
• Computational Phenotyping
• Predictive Modeling, Survival Analysis, and Biomarker Identification
• Automated Diagnosis and Prediction
• Clinical Databases and Information Systems
• Public Health and Population Health Informatics
• Infectious Disease Networks and Computational Epidemiology
• Social Network Analysis for Health Applications
• No-Boundary Thinking in Bioinformatics

Each workshop proposal can be up to 6 pages to include the following information:

• Motivation and rationale for the workshop
• Proposed workshop length: half day, or a full-day with a lunchtime break
• Names and affiliations of main organizers
• A description of the workshop format, i.e. peer-reviewed proceedings, position papers and invited talks, panels, in-depth tutorials/demos:
  • For peer-reviewed sessions, the planned peer-reviewed process should be detailed;
  • For invited talks, names of a list of potential list of speakers should be provided;
  • For panels, the main topic along with a list of panel questions to be addressed, along with names of a potential list of panelists should be provided;
  • For teaching workshops, a draft syllabus should be provided;
  • For demonstration workshops, a general outline of the planned activities and prerequisite materials needed should be described.
• A detailed timeline for inviting and accepting papers and presenters for the workshop should be presented:
• If there is going to be a proceedings for the workshop, would you like the proceedings to appear alongside ACM-BCB proceedings?
• An important goal of the workshops is to engage participants via interactions and/or community building. Each proposal is expected to describe its plans to achieve this goal.
• Any other relevant information to your proposal workshop (e.g. has the proposed workshop be done in the past and in other venues? If so, when and where?).

For the continuing workshops (i.e., the workshops have been held at BCB 2019), a shorter proposal is expected and include the following information:

• Proposed workshop length: half day, or a full-day with a lunchtime break
• Names and affiliations of main organizers
• A detailed timeline for inviting and accepting papers and presenters for the workshop should be presented:
• If there is going to be a proceedings for the workshop, would you like the proceedings to appear alongside ACM-BCB proceedings?
• Past year experiences, lessons learned, and plan to improve.
• Any changes of plans compared to last year.

The proposers are requested to implement the proposed plan only after hearing about the final acceptance notification of the proposed workshop.

Submission procedure:

Each workshop proposal can be up to 6 pages (11pt Times New Roman, single line spacing, 1” page margins on all sides, PDF format). The proposers are requested to address all the details listed above in their proposal.

Submissions are handled via EasyChair(select the track for workshop proposals). Please refer to the conference webpage for further updates on the submission information.

Important Dates:

Workshop proposal deadline: March 31, 2021
Notification of acceptance: April 7, 2021
Workshops will be held on August 1, 2021

Workshop Co-Chairs:

Weihua Guan, University of Minnesota
Jason Moore, University of Pennsylvania
Scott Williams, Case Western Reserve University