Call for Workshops Track Submissions

The 17th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM-BCB 2026) is the flagship conference of ACM SIGBio. It will move for the first time to Europe and will be held in Calabria, Italy from June 30 to July 3, 2026. The conference aims to promote big data, AI and algorithms for health and biomedicine including cutting-edge advances in computational biology, bioinformatics, and health informatics, at the intersection of computer science, biology, health and medicine. The conference will be hosted at University of Calabria Congress Center.

The conference focuses on grand challenges in life sciences and human health by showcasing leading-edge technologies, methods, and tools for data processing, integration, analysis, mining, interpretation, and visualization, with the goal of transforming data into meaningful information and actionable knowledge for biomedical discovery, public and population health, disease prevention, and healthcare delivery.

Workshop Topic Categories

Workshop proposals are invited on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to the following. For clarity and balance, topics are organized into three thematic categories:

1. Omics & Systems Biology

• Sequence Analysis
• Single-cell Sequencing
• Omics Data Integration and Analysis
• Genomic Variation and Disease
• Haplotypes and Population Genomics
• Phylogenetics
• Protein and RNA Analysis, Structure, and Dynamics
• Metagenomics and Algorithms for Microbiomes
• Cancer Genomics
• Pharmacogenomics
• Systems Biology
• Biological Networks and Integrative Analysis
• No-Boundary Thinking in Bioinformatics

2. Clinical & Healthcare Informatics

• Imaging Informatics
• Imaging Genomics and Radiation Genomics
• Computational Phenotyping
• 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
• Data Security and Privacy
• Knowledge Representation Applications

3. AI & Data Science

• AI and Machine Learning in Medicine and Healthcare
• Computational Drug Discovery
• Multimodality Modeling
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text Mining
• Large Language Models (LLMs) for Healthcare Applications
• Data Integration, Harmonization, and Ontology
• Biomedical and Health Data Visualization

Workshop Proposal Requirements

Each workshop proposal can be up to 5 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, a potential list of speakers should be provided;
• for panels, the main topic along with a list of panel questions to be addressed and 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 will be workshop proceedings, 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?)
• If a workshop plans to accept papers, the paper submission deadline is strongly recommended to be after the final decision of the main conference

For the continuing workshops (i.e., the workshops have been held at previous BCB conferences), 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.

Individuals submitting workshops are requested to implement the proposed plan only after hearing about the final acceptance notification of the proposed workshop.

Workshop Format and Attendance Mode

• In-person workshops are strongly encouraged to foster interaction and community building
• Fully virtual workshops are not encouraged.
• Hybrid workshops are allowed as an option, recognizing that ACM-BCB 2026 is the first time the conference is held in Europe and some participants may not be able to attend in person
• Workshop proposals should clearly specify whether the workshop is in-person or hybrid, and describe how engagement will be ensured across participation modes

Proceedings and Publication Policy

The conference proceedings will include only a one-page workshop summary/abstract for each accepted workshop.

Please note that papers accepted and presented at individual workshops will not be published in the conference proceedings. Workshop organizers are responsible for arranging their own publication venue for accepted workshop papers, such as a journal special issue, an external proceedings volume, or an open-access repository.

Submission Procedure

Each workshop proposal can be up to 5 pages. The proposers are requested to address all the details listed above in their proposal. Submitted proposals should comply with the requirements delineated on the ACM Master Article Template website.

Submissions are handled via Open Review.

Important Dates:

Workshop proposals due: January 20, 2026
Notification of acceptance: February 3, 2026
Workshops will be held on June 30, 2026

Workshop Co-Chairs:

Ali Çakmak, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
Serdar Bozdağ, University of North Texas, USA
Wei Zhang, University of Central Florida, USA