Call for Papers: Artificial Intelligence for Synthetic Biology

Date : October 18-20, 2018
Location : Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia, USA
Website : https://www.synbiotools.com/ai-for-synbio-fss-2018/

Submissions are due August 6 for both short (2 pages) and long papers (7 pages).
- If you need additional time, please contact us.
- Submission site: http://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fss18

Our primary goal for this symposium is to begin to connect and build mutually beneficial collaborations between the AI and the synthetic biology communities. There are many problems and applications at the intersection of these two fields.

Synthetic biology is the systematic design and engineering of biological systems. It is a relatively new field and holds the potential for revolutionary advances in medicine, materials engineering, environmental remediation, and more. Synthetic biology can be used for a range of diverse goals, for example developing genetic programs to identify and kill cancer cells or designing plants that can extract pollutants from the ground. AI has the capacity to advance the progress of synthetic biology, and to help realize these goals.

Topics of interest include (but not limited to):
• Managing design complexity, e.g., current design happens at a low level analogous to writing programs in assembly language
• Emerging techniques and tools in synthetic biology produce large amounts of data; understanding and processing this data provides avenues for AI techniques to make a big impact
• Data driven modeling of biological systems presents opportunities to apply AI techniques; work is needed to help predict the outcome of genetic modification, identify the root cause of failure in circuit, and predict the effect of circuit on host organism
• Most organism engineering workflows have little automation and rely heavily on domain expertise, only some of which is shared in publications. Tools that support or carry out information integration and informed decision making can improve the efficiency and speed of organism engineering
The symposium will include: introduction to each domain to ensure it is accessible to attendees with both backgrounds; identification of open problems and challenges in the intersection of AI and synthetic biology; contributed talks; panel discussions; and small and large group discussions mixing synthetic biologists and AI researchers.


Organizing Committee
Aaron Adler (BBN Technologies),
Mohammed Ali Eslami (Netrias, LLC),
Jesse Tordoff (MIT), and
Fusun Yaman (BBN Technologies)