·        A unique two-hours panel/keynote speech to address future research directions and potential funding opportunities  led by 4 Program Managers/Directors in leading funding agency NSF/NIH/DoE:

               Jennifer Couch(NIH),

               Susan Gregurick (DoE-OBER),

               James French  (NSF-IIS)

               Grace Peng (NIH-NIBIB)

·        Keynote speechs

       

Speech 1

Title:
Author: Olivier Bodenreider
Abstract:
Biography of Speaker: Olivier Bodenreider is a Staff Scientist in the Cognitive Science Branch of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. His research interests include terminology, knowledge representation and ontology in the biomedical domain, both from a theoretical perspective and in their application to natural language understanding, reasoning, information visualization and integration. Dr. Bodenreider is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. He received a M.D. degree from the University of Strasbourg, France in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from the University of Nancy, France in 1993. Before joining NLM in 1996, he was an assistant professor for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Nancy, France, Medical School.

 

Speech 2

Title: Functions of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins and Relationship with Human Disease Network
Author: Zoran Obradovic
Abstract: About 10 years ago we developed the first prediction based method to show that thousands of proteins lack fixed structure or are disordered (or unfolded) under physiological conditions. In this talk we will first briefly present the initial and our more recent predictor rated as the best model in disorder category at the seventh critical assessment of structure prediction experiments (CASP7). Next, we will describe how we used this predictor to provide a leap jump in answering a challenging question of understanding relationship between protein disorder and protein function by discovering that 238 Swiss-Prot functional categories are strongly positively correlated with predicted long intrinsically disordered regions. We will also describe a text mining method that can help further characterizations by identifying PubMed publications with relevant protein-disorder related experimental evidence. Motivated by observed strong correlation between intrinsic disorder and molecular functions known to be involved in cancer, we performed a large scale analysis of intrinsic disorder in genes implicated in Human Disease Network. We found significant differences in disorder content distributions for genes related to 20 human disease classes. Prediction of Molecular Recognition Features (MoRFs) suggests that intrinsic disorder in disease genes is mainly involved in protein-protein interactions. Genes related to several classes of diseases were found to have significantly higher occurrence of alternative splicing (AS), and given that we found AS regions to be highly disordered, we conclude that intrinsic disorder, together with AS, likely plays an important role in these classes of diseases.
Biography of Speaker: Zoran Obradovic’s research interests focus on developing data mining and statistical learning methods for knowledge discovery at large databases. He has authored about 200 articles addressing data analysis challenges in bioinformatics, medical informatics and other domains. For example, Obradovic co-authored a number of “first of” informatics studies on protein disorder providing strong support for a hypothesis that intrinsic protein disorder lies at the basis of signaling, regulation, and control. He also served as the team leader for the best predictor in protein disorder category at the fifth, the sixth and the seventh Critical Assessments of Structure Prediction experiments (CASP). Obradovic is currently journal editorial board member at seven journals. He was track chair at seven and program committee member at about 40 informatics conferences. Last year Obradovic co-chaired 39th Symposium on the Interface of Statistics, Computing Science and Applications, ACM First International Workshop on Text Mining in Bioinformatics, and IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine. Currently he serves as the steering committee member of 2008 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine and is the program chair of 2009 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.

 

Speech 4

Title: Telemedicine: Wearable Intelligent Sensors and Systems (WISS) for Mobile Healthcare
Author: Yuan-Ting Zhang
Abstract: The steady-growing global market of medical devices and biosensors over the past decade has brought a great deal of attention to the academia and industry everywhere in the world. To meet the needs of those with the chronic diseases of aging, wearable medical devices are becoming an important part of solution. In order to monitor human health constantly without disturbing users’ normal daily activities, the ideal wearable medical devices and biosensors should be designed to be so smart and autonomous that they will be operable by any individuals from a child to an aged person for their own health management, and to be so small that they will not affect the appearance and function of the wearable carrier in which they are embedded. One of major challenges is to develop new principle of physiologic measurements in incorporation with effective bio-signal processing and medical information fusion techniques enabling the design of small and smart wearable devices. We are currently developing a series of wearable intelligent sensors and systems (WISS) with a body sensor network (BSN) forming the communication infrastructure for telemedicine and mobile healthcare. This talk will review some of the more recent developments in these areas, highlight the evolving MINDS concepts of wearable design, and discuss how the emerging wearable technologies can meet the growing demand for future homecare and mobile health services. With the wearable cuffless blood pressure meter as an example, the talk will also attempt a living proof on how the consumer personal electronic devices can be used in creating innovative and high-value-added healthcare products in a relatively short duration, which could rapidly open up a new product sector for industry and offer great benefits for the society.
Biography of Speaker: Yuan-Ting Zhang received his Ph.D. from the University of New Brunswick, Canada in 1990. He is currently Director of the Joint Research Center for Biomedical Engineering and the Founding Head of the Division of Biomedical Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He also serves as the Director of the Key Lab for Biomedical Informatics and Health Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Director of the SIAT Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering of Chinese Academy of Science and the Chairman (Adjunct) of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Sun Yat-Sen Medical School, Guangzhou, China. Dr. Zhang was a Research Associate and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, Canada from 1989 to 1994. He chaired the Biomedical Division of Hong Kong Institution of Engineers in 1996/97 and 2000/01. Dr. Zhang was the Technical Program Chair of the 20th IEEE-EMBS Annual Int’l Conference in 1998 and the General Conference Chair of the 27th IEEE-EMBS Annual Int’l Conference in 2005. He was elected as an AdCom member in 1999 and served as Vice-President (Conferences) of IEEE-EMBS in 2000. He was a Founding Co-Chair of IEEE-EMBS Summer School on Medical Devices and Biosensors. He has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. on Biomedical Engineering and IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing. He was also the Guest Editor of IEEE Communication Magazine and IEEE Trans. on Information Technology in Biomedicine. He is currently on the Editorial Board of the Book Series of Biomedical Engineering published by the IEEE press, the IEEE-EMBS Technical Committee of Wearable Systems and Sensors, and an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of China Medical Device Information. Dr. Zhang has been selected to serve as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Trans. on Information Technology in Biomedicine since 2008. Dr. Zhang’s research interests include neural engineering, wearable medical devices, and body sensor networks particularly for mobile health and telemedicine. He has published more than 300 scientific articles in the area of biomedical engineering and filed over 15 patent applications. Dr. Zhang and his team received more than 30 awards and recognitions which include the Fellow of International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, IEEE Fellow, AIMBE Fellow, and the recipient of 2006 Distinguished Service Award of IEEE-EMBS.

               Steven Salzberg,

               Yuan-Ting Zhang