Organizers of the Third Immunoinformatics and Computational Immunology Workshop (ICIW 2012) have announced a call for papers for this year’s event to be held in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ACM-BCB2012). The conference is scheduled for October 7-10, 2012 in Orlando, FL.

Naturally emerging or reemerging diseases pose some of the most serious threats to human health. Computational methods are urgently needed for developing new vaccines, therapies, and models to improve our understanding of the immune system, and reliable tools for focusing experimental investigations.

The main theme of this meeting is “Bridging Immunology and Computer Science”. Nowadays computational methods are integral to virtually every research and development project in every discipline. Immunology is not an exception and the need for sophisticated computational methods for research and development in immunology is increasing. At the same time, because of the extreme domain complexity of immunology, the lag between availability of sophisticated computational methods and their implementation in this field is increasing. The ICIW 2012 will include presentations that describe theoretical advances and practical applications that will help bridge this gap and, as a consequence, accelerate the development of immunology. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Structural Immunoinformatics
• Epitope analysis and prediction
• MHC-peptide binding site analysis and prediction
• Immunoinformatics Databases, Knowledge Bases, Ontologies
• Computational modeling of immune system
• Analysis and prediction of minor histocompatibility antigens
• Predictive models for organ transplantation
• Immunogenomics
• Immunomics
• Vaccine design
• Artificial immune systems and other biologically-inspired paradigms
• Multi-agent based modeling of immune response
• Allergenicity prediction
• Gene expression changes in adaptive immune response
• Comparative approaches to immunology

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission deadline: May 28, 2012
Poster Submission deadline: July 2, 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 16, 2012
Camera-ready of accepted papers: August 16, 2012

AUTHOR INSTRUCTIONS

Authors should prepare a Portable Document Format (PDF) version of their full paper. Regular papers must be no longer than 10 pages, papers on evolving research and work in progress should be no longer than 5 pages, following the ACM two-column format for conference proceedings (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) All accepted papers will be included in a Workshop Proceedings to be published on line and included with the conference proceedings on the CD. Authors of selected papers will have an opportunity to extend their workshop papers for publication (subject to peer review) in Journal of Immunological Methods. Papers should be submitted electronically (in PDF form) through “EasyChair” at:  https:/www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iciw2012

POSTER SUBMISSION

We invite authors to submit one-page extended abstracts. Submissions should be sent to yasser@cs.iastate.edu before July 2, 2012. Notification of acceptance will be given by July 16, 2012. Accepted abstracts will be selected for oral or poster presentation and will be included in the workshop Web page.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Vasant Honavar (Iowa State University, USA)
Vladimir Brusic (Harvard University, USA)
Yasser EL-Manzalawy (Iowa State University, USA)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (Tentative)

Becca Asquith (Imperial College London, UK)
Raffaele Calogero (University of Torino, Italy)
Anne De Groot (URI Institute for Immunology and Informatics, USA)
Salvador Eugenio Caoili (University of the Philippines Manila, Philippines)
Tomer Hertz (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, USA)
Can Kesmir (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
Andrzej Kloczkowski (Ohio State University, USA)
Oliver Kohlbacher (University of Tübingen, Germany)
German Nudelman (Mount Sinai School of Medicine, USA)
Bjoern Peters (La Jolla Institute of Allergy and Immunology, USA)
Nikolai Petrovsky (Flinders University, Australia)
Julia Ponomarenko (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Johannes Sollner (Emergentec Biodevelopment GmbH, Austria)
Anna Tramontano (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
Guanglan Zhang (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, USA)