The LONI Institute (http://institute.loni.org), an initiative funded by the Louisiana Board of Regents and six member institutions (Louisiana State University, Louisiana Tech University, Tulane University, Southern University, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and University of New Orleans) invites applications for LONI Institute (LI) Graduate Student Research Assistants. Assistantships are available at all member institutions. Research can be in any area of science, engineering, social sciences, or arts and humanities, although the fellow awards are intended to support graduate students whose research projects require access to high-end computing facilities, networks, distributed data archives, and more generally, cyberinfrastructure. The awards will include a $20,000 stipend and tuition waiver.

LSU CCT, LONI Institute, and LBRN will host the 3rd Workshop on Computational Biology. The 1.5 day event will take place March 26-27, 2010 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. We would like to invite researchers/faculty and graduate students to attend this workshop.

The aim of this workshop is to forge a community of computational biologists across the state and bring together researchers using computational approaches in the biological sciences, HPC providers and the Cyber-Infrastructure developers.

For registration and other detail information, please visit Computational Biology Workshop at

http://lbrn.lsu.edu/urls/cw2010

Workshop Registration Deadline: March 12, 2010

Hotel Registration Deadline for reserved block: March 5, 2010

Dung Pham
Louisiana Biomedical Research Network
LSU Biological Sciences
131 Life Sciences Building
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Phone: 225-578-1848
Fax: 225-578-2597.

Submission deadline: March 1, 2010

Workshop Website: http://salsahpc.indiana.edu/ECMLS2010/

Computing systems are rapidly changing with multicore, GPUs, clusters, volunteer systems, clouds, and grids offering a confusing dazzling array of opportunities. New programming paradigms such as MapReduce and Many Task Computing have joined the traditional repertoire of workflow and parallel computing for the highest performance systems. Meanwhile the Life Sciences are continuing to expand in data generated with continuing improvement in the instruments for high throughput analysis. This “fourth paradigm” (observationally driven science) is joined by complex systems or biocomplexity that can build phenomenological models of biological systems and processes. This workshop juxtaposes these trends seeking those computational methods that will enhance scientific discovery.

SCALA 2010 - Scientific Computing Around Louisiana

February 5-6, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA

 http://www.cct.lsu.edu/SCALA2010

Registration and Submission Open!

ACM International Conference On Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ACM-BCB 2010)

August 2-4, Niagara Falls, New York, USA

ACM-BCB Website: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/ACM-BCB2010

Introduction to principles, concepts, methods, techniques, algorithms, tools and strategies to transform and process the masses of information from biological experiments, focusing particularly on biological sequence data. Covers topics such as pairwise sequence alignment, gene detection, protein structure prediction, analysis of microarray gene expression data, gene mapping, comparative genomics, genome evolution, data mining, visualization and Perl programming (from the basics to BioPerl). We will also discuss the use of high performance computing in processing large amounts of data. This course consists of lectures and in-class, hands-on real life exercises.

Course Numbers
LSUS: CSC 466/666; BIOS 490/690
LSUHSC: BIOCH 290
Other campuses: Please, e-mail us for the info

Course Offered
January 19 - May 11, 2010

Course Texts
Understanding Bioinformatics (0-8153-4024-9)
Perl Programming for the Biologists (0-4714-3059-5)

Planned Guest Lecturers
Dr. Ben Berhane, LSUHSC-S
Dr. Steven Conrad, LSUHSC-S
Dr. Urska Cvek, LSUS
Dr. Nadejda Korneeva, LSUHSC-S
Dr. Mary Lowery-Nordberg, LSUHSC-S
Dr. Rona Scott, LSUHSC-S

Target Audience
Any scientist or science major with desire to learn about this dynamic interdisciplinary field. No previous experience assumed.

Further Information:
Dr. Marjan Trutschl (contact info on pdf)
Dr. Eric First (contact info on pdf)

The IVBI symposium is soliciting original manuscripts in the area of information visualisation applied to all kinds of biomedical data, including genomic and proteomic data. One of the great challenges is the presentation of and interaction with large and complex data sets. The need for integrated methods and creative strategies has provided an opportunity for novel solutions. We encourage submissions of new techniques, old techniques applied in novel ways, new methods, interesting applications and in-depth
surveys. Peer-reviewed publications will be published in official symposium proceedings (with an ISBN number) by the IEEE Computer Society in print and online and will be indexed by major indexing services.

Examples of application topics include (not limited to)
• Microarray data, design and analysis
• Nucleotide and protein sequence alignment
• Sequence analysis, comparison and alignment networks
• Evolution
• Genomics
• Signaling pathways, biochemical networks
• Systems biology
• Mass spectrometry
• Patient records and other medical applications
• Interactions with large data sets
• Annotation and labeling
• Linking literature and semantics in pathway visualizations
• Systems-level analysis of experimental data
• Overview and detail presentation of predictive or uncertain data
• Identification of relationships in disparate data sets
• Comparative methods / user studies / surveys
• etc.

The submission deadline is March 15, 2010.

The conference will be held in London, England July 14, 2010.

More information can be found at www.graphicslink.co.uk/

The LSU Life Sciences Access Grid node has become part of the Global Quality Assurance Program for Access Grid nodes. This program was built by Jason Bell at CQU in Australia to provide and maintain a high standard of communication between Access Grid node sites and presented at previous Access Grid Retreats. An increasing number of nodes are meeting or requiring this level of quality assurance or "QA". Nodes in Australia, Canada, and England, with several others around the world have met this requirement. LSU is the first in the U.S. to do this.

Anyone meeting with a site that has been QA'd will know they are meeting with a site that meets a high level of quality without wasting time troubleshooting networking, audio, and operational issues. In addition, this node is able to begin QA'ing other nodes in the state of Louisiana. A list of available testers are listed here: http://www.accessgrid.org/qatesters

Information about the QA process is available here: http://www.accessgrid.org/qa-program

The list of registered Access Grid nodes on the Access Grid website here: http://www.accessgrid.org/nodes, nodes that are QA'd are checked in red. LSU's Life Sciences node, listed here, was the first in the state to be built in 2002 with the help of funding from then LSU Capital (now CCT), the LSU College of Basic Sciences, and funding from NIH IDeA program is gratefully acknowledged on this website.