Submission

Submission closed.

We invite submissions in two areas: Bioinformatics Education Problems and Bioinformatics for Biologists Chapter Proposals.

Bioinformatics Education Problems should be submitted via the form below and must be received by May 7, 2012. Each submission should cover a single educational bioinformatics problem and ideally comprise the following sections:

• Title.
• Problem introduction and statement. The problem should be well formulated and self-contained, both biologically and computationally, so that an independently motivated student will be able to understand the problem formulation without much previous exposure to the field. We encourage the use of figures and tables as illustrative aids. The introduction to the problem should be concluded with a “problem statement” that requests the solution of a particular instance of the problem.
• Draft of expected solution. Authors should provide an outline of how students are expected to solve this problem and should indicate any major tricks and pitfalls.
• Draft of expected checking process. Authors should also provide a detailed method describing how solutions will be tested for correctness. Should the answer be checked literally (e.g., integer solution calculating edit distance) or by applying a more sophisticated algorithm, such as when multiple optimal solutions exist (e.g., sequence of sorting reversals).
• Optional Dataset. If the problem instance requires a dataset to process, please provide an example of such a dataset (1MB limit).

We expect a wide variety of problems: from classical exercises for the bioinformatics novice to advanced puzzles for graduate students. Problems can be canonical, novel, or anything in between, although ROSALIND universally encourages originality of exposition.

We allow multiple submissions within the same problem environment, including simple and difficult versions of the same problem. For example, an author may provide brute-force and dynamic programming solutions for the same problem (see problem 18 from Project Euler, which is a brute-force introduction to problem 67). Multiple submissions should be provided separately with a corresponding note.

RECOMB-BE imposes no explicit restrictions on format, length, or notation, as we encourage contributors to choose the style they feel is the most appropriate, and we are willing to consider a variety of formats; however, we anticipate that each problem introduction and statement will be at most 2 pages long (and ideally less than a page), not including figures. The conference website contains two sample problem submissions that illustrate the range of difficulty levels that we intend ROSALIND’s problems to cover.

1. “Pairwise Alignment,” by Nikolay Vyahhi, St. Petersburg Academic University
2. “Signed Reversal Distance,” by Phillip Compeau, UC-San Diego

Authors of selected problems will be invited for short oral presentations and discussion as well as asked to submit a joint paper for consideration in PLOS Computational Biology (within the Education Article category). Furthermore, accepted problems will be integrated into the growing ROSALIND website, which will be launched in advance of RECOMB-BE.

Bioinformatics for Biologists (B4B) Chapter Proposals should be submitted via the form below and must be received by May 7, 2012. Each submission in this category should constitute a brief description of the proposed chapter. Authors of selected proposals will be invited for oral or poster presentations at RECOMB-BE 2012. In addition, these authors will be asked to submit a full-length chapter shortly after RECOMB-BE for the second edition of B4B. Proposals should cover a single biological problem and focus on didactic ways to convey the computational ideas needed to address it. Submissions that focus either solely on computational topics or solely on biological topics will not be considered. We anticipate that each chapter proposal will be 1-2 pages long.