ICOLE 2007, Lessach, Austria

The German-Polish Workshop on Computational Biology, Scheduling and Machine Learning took place in the lovely Tauern Alps resort-Lessach. It was organized in the framework of the ICOLE series of workshops. The workshop gathered together 22 scientists, Ph.D. students and Master students from the (USA). They represented the above mentioned three fields of research: Computational Biology, Machine Learning and Scheduling. Altogether there were 6 established researchers , 2 Ph.D. students and 12 M.Sc. students. The aim of the workshop was to present recent developments in the areas of Computational Biology, Scheduling, and Machine Learning, and to exchange ideas coming from different subjects. This could give rise to new approaches, since many problems from different areas can be modeled at a certain level of abstraction by similar tools, e.g., graph theory, and then solved using a similar methodology, e.g., machine learning approaches. The workshop started with several introductory lectures: Jacek Blazewicz and Piotr Lukasiak presented the basic description and aims of the European Project for the Anti-virus Vaccine Development-Compuvac. Barbara Hammer discussed various aspects of machine learning and addressed recent results in prototype-based learning. Later participants presented their achievements and new developments in the field, respectively, along the lines of the workshop. This included two sessions around machine learning presented by participants from Clausthal: one session about challenges and general solution methods in artificial intelligence and one about unsupervised prototype based methods. Several interesting new research results in bioinformatics were gathered together in a couple of sessions: one session addressed the topic of RNA analysis including structure and function analysis, presented by members who are supervised by Marta Szachniuk from Poznan University; a second session centered around new results for protein analysis including, among other aspects, state-of-the-art results on domain recognition for protein structures. This was presented by members of the group lead be Piotr Lukasiak from Poznan University. Aspects of scheduling focused, on the one hand, on assembly line scheduling and car manufacturing presented by students supervised by Grzegorz Pawlak, on the other hand on scheduling of coupled tasks, presented by Michal Tanas. The last session combined all aspects addressed in the workshop: Klaus Ecker (Ohio University) summarized new methods for motif discovery and its combination to gene regulation; Alexander Hasenfuss (Clausthal University of Technology) presented recent machine learning techniques for general data structures such as sequences or graphs. At the end of the workshop Grzegorz Pawlak summarized the approaches used …