CfP AAMAS Workshop Agents in Medicine, Computational Biology, and Bioinformatics (MAS*BIOMED'06)

                           MAS*BIOMED'06
        Call for Papers Second International Workshop on
  Agents in Medicine, Computational Biology, and Bioinformatics
                                          
(http://www.diee.unica.it/biomed06/)
 
                    Workshop to be held at the
             Fifth International Joint Conference on
        Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2006)
                  (http://www.fun.ac.jp/aamas2006/)
 
                  Future University-Hakodate, Japan
                            9th May 2006
 
 
*Important Dates *
Submission Deadline:          January 15, 2006
Notification of Acceptance:   February 19, 2006
Camera ready:                 March 5, 2006
Workshop:                     May 9, 2006
 
 
*Motivation and Description *
There is growing evidence that agent technology can be useful in 
designing and implementing solutions aimed at supporting the automation 
of medical and biological procedures. While it is essential for computer 
scientists and software developers to understand the specific problems 
in medicine and biology, it is also essential for an expert of either 
domain to understand the capabilities of agent technology. The main 
purpose of this workshop is to bring together and create synergies 
between researchers on these fields in order to discuss relevant issues 
and approaches aimed at assessing and promoting the adoption of agent 
technology. It is intended that the workshop mainly focuses on the 
benefits of adopting agent technology in:
(i) storing, accessing, and distributing relevant medical or biological 
data,
(ii) implementing the automation of information-gathering and 
information-inference processes in medical and biological settings,
(iii) supporting e-Health,
(iv) simulating and modeling biological systems.
 
This workshop aims to attract both theoretically and practically 
oriented papers in these thriving areas in the intersection of medicine 
and biology with computer science. The workshop will also focus on 
supporting infrastructures, such as agent-based systems, tools, 
languages, ontologies, and networking facilities for medicine, 
bioinformatics and computational biology. Papers on the application and 
evaluation of agent approaches to the solution of problems in these 
fields will be particularly sought.
 
 
*Topics of interest include but are not limited to: *
* Multi-Agent Interaction in Medical or Biological Settings
  - Coordination of tasks and data
  - Collaboration in peer-to-peer networks
  - Multi-strategy and meta- learning for cooperative information agents
 
* Analysis and Modeling of Data and Tasks
  - Multi-agent systems for medical pre-detection, diagnosis, and treatment
  - Multi-agent systems for patient scheduling, transplant management, 
community care, information access, training,
    internal hospital and clinic tasks, etc.
  - Integrated genotyping and gene linkage analysis
  - Multi-agent approaches to gene expression analysis
  - Modeling of biological processes
 
* Architectures, Languages, Tools, and Applications
  - Agent-based architectures and frameworks tailored for medical or 
biological domains
  - Customization of agent-based tools, languages, and libraries for 
medical or biological domains
 
* Knowledge management
  - Agent-based integration of biological knowledge
  - Agent-based data mining and knowledge discovery in medical or 
biological domains
  - Multi-agent information gathering in medical or biological settings
  - Integration of heterogeneous data sources and/or services
 
* Ontologies for Medical or Biological Domains
  - Collaborative ontology construction
  - Distributed ontology management
 
 
*Submission Procedure*
Those wishing to participate in the workshop are requested to submit an 
original research paper, not published or submitted elsewhere. Papers 
will be peer reviewed by at least two referees from the workshop's 
program committee based on the technical relevance, quality, clarity of 
presentation, objective analysis of the reported experiences, and 
novelty. High-profile survey papers could be also considered for 
publication. The length of a paper must not exceed 15 single-spaced A4 
pages including figures, tables, and references. Papers should be 
formatted using the Springer LNCS style. Templates are available at 
Springer. The language of the workshop is English. At least one of the 
authors per each accepted paper should be able to register with and 
attend the workshop and present the paper. All submissions should be 
sent by email, either in PDF or in PostScript format, to
biomed06 AT diee.unica.it.
The subject of the email should contain "medicine" or "biology" within 
square brackets to facilitate the organizing committee in the task of 
associating papers to referees. All the accepted papers will be printed 
in the workshop proceedings of the workshop.
A selection of the best papers presented at this workshop will be 
considered for a special issue on the same theme at "Multiagent and Grid 
Systems - an International Journal" by IOS press.
 
 
*Organizing Committee*
Giuliano Armano (giuliano.armano@diee.unica.it)
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Univ. of Cagliari (Italy)
Piazza D'Armi - 09123 Cagliari (Italy)
 
Andrew Martin (martin@biochem.ucl.ac.uk)
Dept. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology - Univ. College London (UK)
Darwin Building - Gower Street London WC1E 6BT - England
 
Huaglory Tianfield (h.tianfield@gcal.ac.uk)
Glasgow Caledonian University, School of Computing and Mathematical 
Sciences, SRIF/SHEFC
Centre for Virtual Organization Technology Enabling Research (VOTER) - 
Director
70 Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA, UK
 
Rainer Unland (UnlandR@informatik.uni-essen.de)
Inst. for Computer Science and Business Information Systems (ICB), 
University of Duisburg-Essen
Schuetzenbahn 70, 45117 Essen, Germany
 
 
*Publishing Chair *
Eloisa Vargiu (vargiu@diee.unica.it)
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Univ. of Cagliari (Italy)
Piazza D'Armi - 09123 Cagliari (Italy)
 
 
*Preliminary Program Committee*
  Martin Beer, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)
Hans Czap, Univ. of Trier (Germany)
Joerg Denzinger, Univ. of Calgary (Canada)
Jürgen Klüver, University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
Patty Kostkova, City University (UK)
Emanuela Merelli, Univ. of Camerino (Italy)
Luciano Milanesi, Institute of Biomedical Technologies I.T.B. (Italy)
Simon Miles, University of Southampton (UK)
Agostino Poggi, Univ. of Parma (Italy)
David Riaño, Rovira i Virgili University (Spain)
Margarita Sordo, Harvard Medical School (US)
Jürgen Stausberg, University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
Christina Stoica, University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
Eloisa Vargiu, Univ. of Cagliari (Italy)

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Prof. Dr. Rainer Unland
University of Duisburg-Essen
Institute for Computer Science and Business Information Systems (ICB)
Practical Computer Science, especially Data 
Management Systems and Knowledge Representation
Schuetzenbahn 70
45117 Essen, Germany
Tel.: (+49) 201-183 3421
IP-Tel. Skype: unlandr 
Fax: (+49) 201-183 4460
email: UnlandR   at  informatik.uni-essen.de
WWW: http://www.cs.uni-essen.de/dawis/
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