Conference Report
2006 Workshop on Constraint-based Methods for Bioinformatics
(WCB'06)
Agostino Dovier
University of Udine
Italy
Alessandro Dal Palù
University of Parma
Italy
Sebastian Will
University of Freiburg
Germany
Editor: Enrico Pontelli
Bioinformatics is a challenging area of research where every
serious contribution can have thousands of positive effects in
medicine, agriculture, or industry.
Most of the typical problems can be effectively formulated by using
declarative languages and constraints. Constraint on finite domains
(and on reals) are applied for predicting spatial conformation of
polymers, concurrent constraint programming can be used for simulations
of biological systems, and finally constraints on strings are employed
for the analysis of DNA sequences.
The WCB06 workshop was organized with the aim of sharing new
theoretical and practical results in the area and to discuss whether
there are new challenging problems for the declarative programming and
constraint community. The worskhop is the successor of the
workshops Constraints and Bioinformatics/Biocomputing, co-located with CP'97 and CP'98, and of the workshop WCB'05, co-located with ICLP 2005.
The workshop benefited by the excellent invited talk of Francois Fages about "Using temporal logics with constraints to express biological properties of cell processes"
and by the presentation of 7 contributed papers ranging from protein
folding to system biology, from suffix arrays to supertree
construction. The interest of the constraint community on this theme is
witnessed by the number of participants (35) although the workshop ran
in parallel with other extremely interesting workshops.
An extended summary of the workshop will appear as a chapter of the book "Trends in Constraint Programming''
edited by Frèdèric Benhamou, Narendra Jussien, and Barry
O'Sullivan, to be published by Hermes Science. Moreover, a special
issue of Constraints Journal on the topics of the workshop will be announced in the following weeks.
During the final discussion, we decided to try to colocate the next
edition with ICLP06 in Porto, where we hope to meet the Logic
Programming community that can give a strong contribute to this
research area.