Systemic Approaches in Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology: Recent Advances

The convergence of biology and computer science was initially motivated by the need to organize and process a growing number of biological observations resulting from rapid advances in experimental techniques. Today, however, close collaboration between biologists, biochemists, medical researchers, and computer scientists has also generated remarkable benefits for the field of computer science. Systemic Approaches in Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology: Recent Advances presents new techniques that have resulted from the application of computer science methods to the organization and interpretation of biological data. The book covers three subject areas: bioinformatics, computational biology, and computational systems biology. It focuses on recent, systemic approaches in computer science and mathematics that have been used to model, simulate, and more generally, experiment with biological phenomena at any scale.

Paola Lecca received a Master Degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Trento (Italy) and a PhD in Computer Science from the International Doctorate School in Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Trento (Italy). Currently Paola Lecca is the Principal Investigator of the Inference and Data manipulation research group at The Microsoft Research - University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology (Trento, Italy). Dr. Paola Lecca's research interests include stochastic biochemical kinetic, biological networks inference, optimal experimental design in biochemistry and computational cell biology. She designed prototypes for biological model calibration and for the simulation of diffusion pathways in cells and tissues. She has published articles in leading medical, biological and bioinformatics Journals and Conferences. She received a best paper prize at Brain, Vision and Artificial Intelligence (Naples, Italy 2007) presenting a kinetic model of cerebral glucose metabolism in astrocytes. Paola Lecca is carrying on an intense editorial activity, editing books and as editorial member of CSC bioinformatics journals. She is a member of the Italian Society of Pure and Applied Biophysics. Paola Lecca has experience in organizing international conferences and as PC member of many international conferences as well (SAC ACM, ISB, ICCB, ICCMB).

Dan Tulpan received a BSc/B.eng. Degree (2000) from POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest (Romania) and a PhD Degree in Computer Science (2006) from the University of British Columbia (Canada). Dan is a research officer in the Knowledge Discovery Group at the Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council Canada and lead of the NRC-IIT Bioinformatics Laboratory. Dan is also appointed as Adjunct Professor (2010) in the Department of Biology, University of Moncton, Honorary Research Associate (2009) in the Department of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick and Research Associate (2009) at the Atlantic Cancer Research Institute in Moncton. Dan's research interests include the development of algorithms and technologies in biotechnology (microarray probe design), bioinformatics (comparative genomics, metabolomics) and data analysis and visualization.

Rajaraman Kanagasabai is currently a Principal Investigator at the Data Mining Department, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore and leads the Semantic Technology Group. He has widely published in top peer-reviewed journals and conferences and served in the Programme Committees of many international conferences. He has also chaired or co-chaired several international events related to Bioinformatics, Bio Ontologies and Analytics. He was part of the core research team behind the multiple-award winning iAgent - the first multilingual search engine, WebWatch - the key technology behind the successful startup BuzzCity and the KnowleSuite technology that has been spunoff as Knorex. He was also the leader of the team that won the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventor's Award for Web Data Extraction technology in 2006. His research interests include Semantic technologies, Bio Ontologies, SOA & Web services, text/web mining.