Proceedings of the eighth annual international conference on Computational molecular biology - RECOMB '04

Abstract

This volume contains the papers presented at the Eighth Annual International Conference on Computational Biology, also known as RECOMB 2004, held in San Diego, California, March 27-31, 2004. The RECOMB conference series was started by Sorin Istrail, Pavel Pevzner and Michael Waterman in 1997. It is a tradition that polished versions of a selected subset of the papers from the Proceedings also appear in The Journal of Computational Biology, which is closely affiliated with the conference. Polished versions of many of the other papers will also appear in journal form.This year, 215 papers were submitted, from which the Program Committee selected 38 for presentation at the meeting and inclusion in these proceedings. The biological focus of the papers and the technical methods used, span a very wide range of computational biology. The submissions were fully refereed, mostly by three or more committee members, and the selection process involved several weeks of discussions among committee members before the accepted papers were selected. The reviews were given to the authors to allow changes and improvements in the final published conference paper. Due to the limit on the number of papers that can be presented, there were many strong papers that, regrettably, could not be accepted.n addition to the talks and the published papers, RECOMB offers an opportunity for conference attendees to present their work in poster and abstract form. Around 150 to 200 posters will be presented in two poster sessions.One of the highlights of each RECOMB conference is a collection of nine keynote invited lectures by researchers of the highest international esteem. Four of these lectures are specially named. We are fortunate this year to have lectures from: Carlos Bustamante (UC Berkeley, Distinguished New Technologies Lecture), Russell Doolittle (UC San Diego, The Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Computational Biology Lecture), Andrew Fire (Stanford University, Distinguished Biology Lecture), Richard Karp (UC Berkeley, Fred Howes Distinguished Service Award), William McGinnis (UC San Diego), Deborah Nickerson (University of Washington), Martin Nowak (Harvard), Christine Orengo (University College, London), and Elizabeth Winzeler (Scripps Research Institute). We thank all of these speakers for their participation.RECOMB 2004 was sponsored by The Association for Computing Machinery and SIGACT, The University of California-San Diego, The San Diego Supercomputer Center, and The International Society for Computational Biology. Generous support for the conference comes from Accelrys, Applied Biosystems, Apple Computer, Applied Biosystems, Cambridge University Press, Cornell Theory Center, CRC Press - Taylor and Francis Group, The Department of Energy, Geneart GmbH, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Microsoft Research, The National Science Foundation, Paracel, Partek Incorporated, Springer-Verlag New York Inc., The MIT Press, and Timelogic.