Fourth International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM 2010)

October 25-26, European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK

The Fourth Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM 2010) will be held at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK on October 25th and 26th, 2010.

SMBM 2010 aims to bring together researchers from text and data mining in biomedicine, medical, bio- and chemoinformatics, and researchers from biomedical ontology design and engineering. SMBM 2010 is the follow-up event of SMBM 2005 (EBI, U.K.),  SMBM 2006 (University of Jena, Germany) and SMBM 2008 (University of Turku, Finland). 

A parallel event (LBM: The International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine) has been held in 2005 (KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea), 2007 (Matrix, Biopolis, Singapore) and 2009 (Jeju Island, South Korea).

The biomedical research community eagerly awaits the full integration of very large text collections, biological databases, ontologies and terminological resources. However, many challenges have yet to be met to achieve this ambitious goal. Significant advances have been made and many working systems for tasks ranging from entity recognition and simple relation extraction to structured event extraction have been deployed. Where do we stand and how do we advance toward fully integrated systems combining the different tools and data sources?

We are inviting papers from a full range of topics (see below), emphasizing in particular work on methods deployed in a production-like research environment, the integration of text with domain resources such as micro-array data and ontological resources such as GO, UMLS etc. We also welcome contributions from across the biomedical domains, including genomics, translational medicine, clinical practice, and public health.

The conference will feature keynote invited presentations by Erik Neumann (Clinical Semantics Group) and by Robert Stevens (University of Manchester). A half-day tutorial on Evaluation of Bio-Textmining systems will be offered on Sunday Oct 24th.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Text mining, information extraction, and information retrieval
• Terminology and ontology development for biomedical information systems
• Evaluation techniques and standards for text mining solutions
• Integration of text and data mining in the biomedical domain
• Annotation schemes for biomedical corpora
• Text mining for resource building, e.g. ontologies, and resource enrichment, e.g., biomedical databases
• Representation and discovery of biomedical domain knowledge
• Privacy/trust, e.g in processing of patient records
• Image/caption processing in relation to content extraction
• domain-specific reasoning processes, e.g., to infer non-explicit information,
  validation (trust-worthiness, believability, safety) of extracted information
• (Semantic) Web mining of biomedical information
  

All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings that will be available online. We invite both full and short papers, where full papers will be given an oral presentation and short papers presented as posters. Selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version for publication in the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS).

A best paper award will be announced at the conference. Journal  publication fees will be waived for the best paper.

Submissions should follow the instructions for JBMS authors, with a limit of eight (8) pages for full papers and four (4) pages for short papers (plus one optional page for references). Manuscripts will be submitted electronically as PDF files. Reviewing will be double-blind, and submissions should therefore NOT contain author names or other obviously identifying information.

Important dates

Invited speakers

• Erik Neumann (Clinical Semantics Group)
• Robert Stevens (University of Manchester).