Special Session

 

Optimization, Learning, and Decision-Making in Bioinformatics and Bioengineering

 

 

2019 IEEE CONGRESS ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION (CEC 2019)

 

Conference dates: June 10^th to 13^th 2019

Paper submission deadline: January 7^th 2019

 

Wellington, New Zealand

 

 

Organizers

Joseph A. Brown

Innopolis University, Russia

 

Gonzalo Ruz

Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, Chile

 

Daniel Ashlock

University of Guelph, Canada

 

Allmendinger Richard

The University of Manchester, UK

 

 

 

Scope and call for papers

This special session invites papers discussing recent advances in the development and application of Optimization, Learning, and Decision-Making in Bioinformatics and Bioengineering.

Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BB) are interdisciplinary scientific fields involving many branches of computer science, engineering, mathematics, and statistics. Bioinformatics is concerned with the development and application of computational methods for the modeling, retrieving and analysis of biological data, while Bioengineering is the application of engineering techniques to biology so as to create usable and economically viable products.

Bioinformatics and Bioengineering are relatively new fields in which many challenges and issues can be formulated as (single and multiobjective) optimization problems. These problems span from traditional problems, such as the optimization of biochemical processes, construction of gene regulatory networks, protein structure alignment and prediction, to more modern problems, such as directed evolution, drug design, experimental design, and optimization of manufacturing processes, material and equipment.

The main aim of this special session is to bring together both experts and new-comers working on Optimization, Learning and Decision-Making in Bioinformatics and Bioengineering to discuss new and exciting issues in this area. This session is supported by the IEEE CIS Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee (BBTC) and the IEEE CIS Task Force on Optimization Methods in Bioinformatics and Bioengineering.

We encourage submission of papers describing new optimization/learning/decision-making strategies, challenges, and applications in the area of BB. You are invited to submit papers that are unpublished original work for this special session at IEEE CEC 2019. The topics are, but not limited to, the following

• (Single and multiobjective) optimization techniques for Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BB) problems
  • Evolutionary algorithms
  • Swarm intelligence
  • Fuzzy optimization
  • Metaheuristics
  • Surrogate-based methods
  • Hybrid optimization algorithms (combinations of heuristics and exact methods)


• Decision-making techniques and MCDM for BB problems
  • Preference elicitation and representation
  • Aggregation-based techniques
  • Fuzzy logic-based techniques


• Learning in/from the optimization of BB problems
  • Link between Decision Maker's learning and model's learning
  • Data-driven optimization for BB problems
  • Capturing and learning from user preferences
  • Integrating optimization with machine learning
  • Interactive learning and optimization techniques
  • Techniques for learning user-driven parameter settings from examples


• Tuning of optimization, learning and decision-making techniques for BB problems
  • Performance measures
  • Test and benchmark problems
  • (Interactive) visualization techniques
  • Optimization and visualization software


• Emerging Topics in BB
  • Novel applications (process design, manufacturing, etc)
  • Challenging problem features (e.g. many decision variables, dynamic problems, uncertainty, expensive and limited evaluations, etc)
  • Closed-loop applications and challenges
  • Many-objective optimization, learning, and decision-making
  • Ecoinformatics
  • Side effect machines and other kernal representations for sequence analysis
  • Data modelling/mining, and Big Data analytics

Submission instructions

We welcome original contributions describing ongoing projects or completed work. The instructions for authors, and LaTeX and Word templates can be found at http://cec2019.org/papers.html.

Important dates

Paper submission: January 7, 2019
Author notification: March 7, 2019
Final Submission: March 31, 2019

Program committee

Ashlock Daniel, University of Guelph, Canada
Ashlock Wendy, Ashlock & McGuinness Consulting Inc, Canada
Auephanwiriyakul Sansanee, Chiang Mai University, Thailand
Brown Joseph, Innopolis University, Russia
Corns Steven, Missouri University, USA
Fogel Gary, Natural Selection Inc, USA
Handl Julia, University of Manchester, UK
Houghten Sheridan, Brock University, Canada
Jin Yaochu, University of Surrey, UK
Langdon Bill, University College London, UK
Lavygina Anna, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Lozano Jose, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain
Plagianakos Vassilis, University of Central Greece, Greece
Rombo Simona, University of Palermo, Italy
Ruz Gonzalo, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, Chile

Contact

Please feel free to contact us
Joseph A. Brown: j.brown@innopolis.ru
Gonzalo Ruz: gonzalo.ruz@uai.cl
Daniel Ashlock: dashlock@uoguelph.ca
Richard Allmendinger: richard.allmendinger@manchester.ac.uk

About the organizers

	Joseph A. Brown (S'09-M'14) was born in Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON, Canada, on July 6, 1985. He received the B.Sc. (Hons.) with first class standing in computer science with a concentration in software engineering, and M.Sc. in computer science from Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada in 2007 and 2009, respectively. He received the Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Guelph in 2014. He previously worked for Magna International Inc. as a Manufacturing Systems Analyst and as a visiting researcher at ITU Copenhagen. He is currently an Assistant Professor and head of the Artificial Intelligence in Games Development Lab at Innopolis University in Innopolis, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada. Local arrangements chair for the 2015 and Special Sessions Chair for the 2017/8 IEEE Symposium on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB). He sits as a member of the Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee (BBTC) of the Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) of the IEEE. Webpage: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joseph_Brown7
	Gonzalo Ruz is an Associate Professor and Director of the Complexity Research Center, at the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, Santiago, Chile. Gonzalo received his B.Sc., P.E., and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile. He then completed his PhD degree at Cardiff University, UK. Gonzalo is Vice Chair of Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee of the Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) of IEEE, and member of the Technical Committee on Pattern Recognition for Bioinformatics (IAPR TC-20) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. His research interests include machine learning, evolutionary computation, data mining, gene regulatory network modelling, and complex systems. Webpage: https://gonzaloruz.com
	Daniel Ashlock is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Guelph in Canada. Dr. Ashlock's work in bioinformatics and optimization includes the invention of side effect machines, woven string kernals, and other forms of optimization that support DNA classification. Dr. Ashlock is also a leading researcher in the creation of sequencing-error tolerant embeddable tags as well as having working in optimization on ecological data sets. Dr. Ashlock is an Associate Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. He is a longstanding member of the IEEE Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee, and has served as General Chair of CIBCB twice. Webpage: http://eldar.mathstat.uoguelph.ca/dashlock/
	Richard Allmendinger is a Lecturer at the Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS), The University of Manchester, UK. Richard has joined AMBS after a 4-year long stint as Postdoc at the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Emergent Macromolecular Therapies, University College London (UCL), UK. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, UK, and an MSc in Business Engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of technology (KIT). Richard is Vice-Chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Optimization Methods in Bioinformatics and Bioengineering and a Member of the IEEE CIS Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee. He is also on the Editorial Board of the Applied Soft Computing journal and was the General Chair of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB 2017). His main research interest is the development and application of optimization and learning techniques to real-world problems arising in areas such as healthcare, drug development and manufacturing, Webpage: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Richard.Allmendinger