Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology

, co-chair of the first ISMB conference. Early meetings The origins of the ISMB conference lie in a workshop for artificial intelligence researchers with an interest in molecular biology held in November 1991. The workshop was organised by American researcher Lawrence Hunter, then director of the Machine Learning Project at the United States National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland. A subsequent workshop on the same topic held in 1992, hosted by the NLM and the National Science Foundation, made it clear that a regular international conference for the field was required. Such a conference would be dedicated to molecular biology as a rapidly emerging application of artificial intelligence. Having successfully applied for grants from AAAI, NIH and the Department of Energy Office of Health and Environmental Research, the first ISMB conference was held in July 1993, at the NLM. The conference was chaired by Hunter, David Searls (research associate professor at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine) and Jude Shavlik (assistant professor of computer science at University of Wisconsin–Madison) and attracted over 200 attendees from 13 countries, attended by 2,136 delegates, submitting 496 scientific papers. Alfonso Valencia considers ISMB/ECCB 2004 to be an important milestone in the history of ISMB: "it was the first one where the balance between Europe and the States became an important part of the conference. It was here that we established the rules and the ways and the spirit of collaboration between the Americans and the Europeans." To allow more delegates to attend, it was decided to limit conference locations to North America and Europe. In January 2007, ISMB and ECCB agreed to hold joint conferences in Europe every other year, beginning with ISMB/ECCB 2007. ISMB/ECCB 2013 was held in Berlin, Germany and was attended by around 2,000 delegates, submitting 233 scientific papers. ==Format==

Main conference The main ISMB conference is usually held over three days and consists of presentations, poster sessions and keynote talks. The number of posters presented at ISMB has also increased dramatically. 25 posters were presented at ISMB 1994; ISMB runs on a budget in excess of $1.5M and, in terms of proceeds, brings in four times that of the other ISCB conferences (ISCB-Latin America, ISCB-Africa, ISCB-Asia, Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference, CSHALS and the Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference) combined. Satellite events Pre-conference tutorials have played an important role in ISMB since the first conference. As attendance at ISMB grew in the late 1990s, several satellite meetings and special interest group (SIG) meetings formed alongside the main conference. SIG meetings are held over one or two days before the main conference and focus on a specific topic, allowing more detailed discussion than there would be time for in the main conference. Notable SIG meetings include the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), which has been held annually since 2000 and Bio-Ontologies, which has been held annually since 1998. Satellite meetings are usually two days long and are held in conjunction with ISMB. The 12th CAMDA conference and the 9th 3DSIG meeting were held as satellite meetings of ISMB/ECCB 2013. ==List of conferences==