CALL FOR POSTERS

In its 2002-2003 program on "Probability and Statistics in Complex
Systems: Genomics, Networks, and Financial Engineering" the IMA, joint
with RECOMB, will put on a satellite workshop on the topic,
"Comparative Genomics", 20-24 October 2003.  The organizers are
   Jens Lagergren, Royal Institute of Technology, jensl@nada.kth.se
    Bernard M.E. Moret, University of New Mexico, moret@cs.unm.edu
       David Sankoff, University of Ottawa, sankoff@uottawa.ca

Confirmed speakers include: Brinkman, Fiona S.; Durand, Dannie;
El-Mabrouk, Nadia; Eichler, Evan; Guigo, Roderic; Housworth, Elizabeth;
Kaessman, Henrik; Lagergren, Jens; Larget, Bret; Lerat, Emmanuelle;
Lynch, Michael; Martin, William; Mclysaght, Aoife; O'brien, Steve;
Pevzner, Pavel; Wang, Li-San; Wolfe, Ken.

The satellite is planned to become an annual event. I am happy that
you will participate.

This first year the speakers are mainly invited speaker and many of
them are biologists. We still hope that all attendees will participate
actively.

We plan to have a poster session on the first day of this workshop,
during the "IMA Tea and More".  If you are interested in presenting a
poster AND YOU HAVE ALREADY BEEN INVITED TO THIS WORKSHOP, please
send an abstract and title to
			abstracts@ima.umn.edu

(NOTE: If you have NOT already been invited, and would like to
request an invitation, please point to
	      http://www.ima.umn.edu/docs/reg_form1.html
and fill out the form appearing there.)

The abstracts will be published in LNBI Springer Verlag. Poster
abstracts should be 1 to 2 pages and submitted no later than
		      Wednesday 27 August 2003.
Three of the abstracts will be selected for short presentations.


NOTE: IF POSSIBLE, please send a TEXT or TEX abstract. For some of our
publications, we cannot easily incorporate other formats (e.g.,
pdf, rtf, powerpoint). Thanks.

Your abstracts and titles will help us publicize the program on the
IMA home page.  Information about the workshop, including a schedule
once it has been created, can be found at
	     http://www.ima.umn.edu/complex/fall/c2.html
This cite already contains information on participation, registration,
accommodations, and travel. REGISTRATION FEE: $0.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Thanks very much for your contribution to this most exciting program!

Sincerely,
Scot Adams

==================================================================
                                  |
 Scot Adams                       | 411 Lind Hall, 207 Church St. SE
 IMA Associate Director           | University of Minnesota
 Professor of Mathematics         | Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA
                                  |
 phone:   (612) 624-5772/625-5507 | fax:     (612) 626-7370
 e-mail:  adams@ima.umn.edu       | website: http://www.ima.umn.edu/~adams
==================================================================

The increasing availability of complete genomes from diverse organisms
offers unprecedented opportunities. Exploitation of the full power
intergenomic comparative maps for all types of genomic events will be
central in biological, medical and bioinformatics research in the
post-genomic era. Several areas are crucial to the success of this
enterprise, for instance: understanding patterns and processes of
genome evolutionary change, mapping genomic mutational events, and the
utilization of such maps as bioinformatics tools. Genomic data also
facilitates phylogeny reconstruction based on genomic mutational
events rather than nucleotide substitution.

The kernel of comparative genome analysis is the establishment of the
correspondence (orthology analysis) between genes in different
genomes. It is such intergenomic maps that make it possible to
translate information from one organism to another. Genome evolution
is shaped by a multitude of evolutionary events acting at various
organizational levels. On a low level point mutations affect
individual nucleotides. On a higher level genome segments are affected
by processes such as duplication, lateral transfer, inversion,
transposition, deletion and insertion. Finally, the whole genome is
influenced by speciation and hybridization of organism lineages. The
complexity of genome evolution poses a serious challenge in developing
mathematical models and algorithms. Fortunately, there is a spectra of
algorithmic techniques that can be applied to problems from this
domain, ranging from exact, heuristic, fixed parameter and
approximation algorithms for problems based on parsimony models to
Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithms for Bayesian analysis of problems
based on probabilistic models.