The ISMB conferences began 1993 and were the driving force behind the founding of the International Society for Computational Biology (www.iscb.org) in 1997, which has been organizing this conference ever since. ISCB is the only society representing computational biology on a worldwide scale and its flagship conference ISMB has become the largest conference on computational biology worldwide. ISCB continues to see ISMB as its major flagship annual event. The ISMB conference aims at attracting the top research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology. Typical, but not exclusively, the topics of interest are: Sequence analysis, Evolution and phylogeny, Comparative genomics, Protein structure, Molecular and supramolecular dynamics, Molecular evolution, Gene regulation and transcriptomics, Proteomics, Systems biology, Ontologies, data bases and data integration, Text mining and information extraction, and Human health.

 Mission. The ISMB conference series aim at attracting the top research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology. Typical, but not exclusive, the topics of interest are: Sequence analysis, Evolution and phylogeny, Comparative genomics, Protein structure, Molecular and supramolecular dynamics, Molecular evolution, Gene regulation and transcriptomics, Proteomics, Systems biology, Ontologies, data bases and data integration, Text mining and information extraction, and Human health. The conference also aims to attract participants from related disciplines in order to understand the need that exists for computational approaches in related fields, and to gain from approaches taken in other disciplines that might be appropriate for computational biology.
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Toronto 2008. The Sixteenth International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2008) will be held in Toronto, Canada on July 19 - 23, 2008.

At the ISMB/ECCB 2007 in Vienna, we encouraged an increased participation of scientists involved in experimental biology and those researching in industry. This momentum will be taken further at the meeting in Toronto. This guiding goal will impact the organization of the meeting in many ways including through the introduction of Special Session Tracks (www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2007/specialsessions/) for related disciplines, a special Industry Track (www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2007/industry), Highlight Tracks (www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2007/highlights) for work published in journals frequented by experimental biologists. An increase in the number of keynote presentations will provide insights into open areas of research from experimental perspectives.

We expect over 1600 attendees in Toronto in July 2008.

The Toronto conference program will include around 70 contributed papers that will be selected by an international program committee during a rigorous review process rivaling the editorial procedure for top-rate scientific journals with an acceptance rate of 10-15%. Contributed papers are collected in a volume published by as a Supplement to the OUP Journal Bioinformatics and are available at the conference. In Vienna, there will also be an open track presentation of selected work that is not coupled to a publication. A further point in the program is a lively poster session. At recent ISMB conferences ~1,000 posters have been presented.
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Past keynote addresses. One of the highlights of each ISMB and ECCB conference is a collection of keynotes awarded to researchers of highest international esteem who are asked to inform the community of historical perspectives or landmark advances in computational and experimental research and inject new directions into the field of computational molecular biology. Past keynote addresses included:

Stephen Altschul (NCBI), Tom Blundell (Cambridge), Sydney Brenner (Salk), Søren Brunak (DTU Denmark), Stephen Burley (SGX), Ford Doolittle (Dalhousie), Russell Doolittle (UCSD), Manfred Eigen (Goettingen), Michael Eisen (Berkely), David Eisenberg (UCLA), Eric Green (NIH), Barry Honig (Columbia), Leroy Hood (Seattle), Robert Huber (Munich), Bernardo Huberman (Hewlett Packard Labs), Eric Lander (MIT), Mike Levine (Berkeley), David Lipman (NCBI), John Mattick (Queensland), Gene Myers (HMM), Erin O'Shea (HHMI), Svante Paabo (Leipzig), Richard Roberts (Ipswich), Gerald Rubin (HHMI), David Sankoff (Otttawa), Harold Scheraga (Cornell), Temple Smith (Boston Univ), Terry Speed (Berkely), John Sulston (Hinxton), Janet Thornton (EBI), Craig Venter (Celera), Gunnar von Heijne (Stockholm), Michael Waterman (USC), Kurt Wuethrich (ETH).
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ISMB conferences have been held at:

1992 National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, USA
1994 Stanford University, USA
1995 Cambridge University, England
1996 Washington University, St. Louis, USA
1997 Halkidiki, Greece
1998 Montreal, Canada
1999 Heidelberg, Germany bioinf.mpi-sb.mpg.de/conferences/ismb99/WWW
2000 San Diego, USA www.iscb.org/ismb2000
2001 Copenhagen, Denmark ismb01.cbs.dtu.dk
2002 Edmonton, Canada www.iscb.org/ismb2002
2003 Brisbane, Australia www.iscb.org/ismb2003/
2004 Glasgow, Scotland (with ECCB 2004) www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2004/
2005 Detroit, USA www.iscb.org/ismb2005/
2006 Fortaleza, Brazil ismb2006.cbi.cnptia.embrapa.br
2007 Vienna, Austria (with ECCB 2007) www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2007/
2008 Toronto, Canada www.iscb.org/ismb2008/

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ISMB/ECCB. The ECCB Conference has been organized annually by a panel of European Computational Biologists

(http://bioinf.mpi-sb.mpg.de/conferences/eccb/eccb.htm)

Since 2002 and is the only pan-European conference series in this field. At Glasgow in 2004, ISMB and ECCB joined forces in a common meeting that was by many standards perceived as the most successful such meeting in computational biology. The two societies (ECCB and ISCB) have agreed to share their main meetings every two years in the near future. Their next common meeting will be Vienna 2007.

The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) is a multi-disciplinary conference that bridges the fields of computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology by bringing together involved scientists from all over the world. It has a revolving scheme in which, each year, one of the European countries hosts the European conference, often jointly with the national conference on computational biology.

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