Collaborative Research: Student Travel Support: international Workshop on Big Data in Life Sciences

The objective of this proposal is to request funds that will be used to support students and postdoctoral researchers from U.S. institutions to travel to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Workshop on Big Data in Life Sciences (BigLS), to be held on September 20, 2014 in Newport Beach, CA, in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics (ACM BCB). Funds will be used to support up to 10 students and postdoctoral researchers, working in areas related to Big Data and life sciences. Recipients of the support will be selected via a widely advertised competitive process involving the submission of a travel grant application, and review by the program committee. Preference will be given to women and underrepresented minority groups, first-generation college students, and undergraduate researchers. The workshop will focus on five key research themes that underline research in Big Data in life sciences: i) scalable algorithms and techniques for Big Data analytics in molecular biology, ii) statistical and integrative approaches to Big Data biology and informatics, iii) high performance computing methods and software for Big Data biology, iv) scientific workflows and platforms for Big Data in life sciences, v) software and hardware solutions for managing Big Data in biomedical informatics. Big Data problems and challenges have become a reality in modern day computational biology and bioinformatics. This travel award will help orient students and postdoctoral researchers in the emerging area of Big Data analytics in life sciences. It will create a unique opportunity for supported students to present their on-going work, network with experts and peers in the field, receive mentoring, while contributing to the workshop's technical program. It will help to prepare the future generation scientific workforce to meet the challenges of this critical area of life sciences.