Bellevue, Washington USA, July 14–18, 2013
In the last two decades, many computer scientists in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics have made significant
contributions to modeling biological systems. Indeed, the fields of computational structural biology are now highly
populated by researchers with diverse background in search, planning, learning, evolutionary computation, constraint
programming, machine learning, data mining, etc., and great progress is being made on methods to solve problems related
to structure prediction, motion simulation, and design of biological macromolecules (proteins, RNA). These problems pose
difficult search and optimization tasks on vast, high-dimensional, continuous search spaces underlined by non-linear
multimodal energy surfaces.
An example of such interdisciplinary approaches is the application of probabilistic search techniques, originally developed
for robot motion planning, to model protein structure and flexibility. Many search algorithms have been brought forth from
this Robotics-based community, with a rich body of recent literature. On the other hand, another community within AI
focuses on optimization issues with non-linear multimodal energy functions, and many researchers in this community
propose evolutionary search frameworks for modeling structures and motions of proteins. Yet others focus on geometry,
symmetry, discrete search, machine learning, and other frameworks to model biomolecular structures. Methods based on AI
algorithms have also been proposed for computational protein design.
We believe the aforementioned sub-communities in AI and Robotics have now gained enough maturity and expertise in
computational structural biology. It is important to provide venues for these researchers to come together and share views,
treatments, and findings on protein and nucleic acid modeling. We hope this workshop will promote interactions for crosspollination
of ideas, lead towards more powerful treatments, and in turn allow the field to make further progress.
Important Dates
January 8, 2013 | Call for Papers released |
March 28, 2013 | Paper submission deadline |
April 19, 2013 | Notification of Acceptance |
May 17, 2013 | Early Registration Deadline |
June 14, 2013 | Late Registration deadline |
June 15, 2013 | Final Workshop program available online |
July 15, 2013 | Workshop at AAAI 2013 |