BIOKDD 2002: recent advances in data mining for bioinformatics

1. FOREWORD Bioinformatics provides opportunities for developing novel data mining methods. Some of the grand challenges in bioinformatics include protein structure prediction, homology search, multiple alignment and phylogeny construction, genomic sequence analysis, gene finding and gene mapping, as well as applications in gene expression data analysis, drug discovery in pharmaceutical industry, etc. Following the greatly successful 1st BIOKDD Workshop [1], the 2nd BIOKDD Workshop on Data Mining in Bioinformatics was held in July 2002, at Edmonton, Canada, in conjunction with 8th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The workshop aimed to present latest results in this important area at the intersection of biology and KDD. The workshop proceedings contained 10 papers (out of 16 submissions) that were accepted for presentation at the workshop. Each paper was reviewed by two or three members of the program committee. Along with one invited speaker, we were able to assemble a very exciting program. A brief overview of the invited talk and contributed papers appears below. Online proceedings of both the BIOKDD workshops are accessible at: