[Apologies for cross-postings]

Call for Abstracts and Participation

1st Workshop on Biomedical Information Management: Challenges and Open Problems Date: February 19/20, 2018
Location: Hamburg, Germany

Important dates:
- Abstract Submission: Jan 12, 2018
- Confirmation for presentation: Jan 19, 2018
- Registration: free until Feb. 9, 2018 (sponsored by BIMDANUBE project, see below)
- Workshop: Feb 19/20, 2018

The workshop will gather interested professionals across Europe working in the information or medical domain, such as medical researchers, medical doctors and entrepreneurs building their business around biomedical ICT.

The goal of the workshop is to obtain answers to the following questions:

* Use Cases: Experiences with information and knowledge management solutions actively used in the community
* Limitations of the current solutions
* Practitioner's view: Important problems in biomedical information management that are not addressed and automatized yet
* Educator's view: Important information bottlenecks in teaching medical students
* Proposals for next generation biomedical information management
* Artificial Intelligence in the Biomedical domain and in life sciences, including image/video, laboratory, EEG/MRT, -omics and text data
* Stakeholder's perspectives: Practitioners, Administration, Insurances, Researchers, Pharmaceutical Industry, ..

We invite abstracts up to 250 words, indicating your preference for a 15 or 30 minute presentation.

The workshop will feature a series of long invited talks (see http://bimdanube.eu/#ws1 for the current list of speakers), participant's talks, moderated panel discussions and ample time for networking and exchange.

Background:
Recently, information management as a field faced several challenges. On one hand, sophisticated technologies and standards were developed to support knowledge-based modeling, such as domain ontologies including UMLS, SNOMED CT, MeSH, Disease Ontology,
and Gene Ontology and the Sematic Web description languages and infrastructures including RDF, OWL, SPARQL and others. On the other hand, however the current approaches face three major issues: (1) knowledge bottleneck: required resources for knowledge
management such as domain ontologies are not available for many domains and languages; (2) the overall approach of knowledge management did not get widely spread due to the fact that it imposes a large burden on the user, such as annotation or expertise
with complex tools like Protégé; (3) modeling entire domains as large as the medical domain with (English-oriented) knowledge resources does not meet requirements of users, who are mostly specializing in a certain sub-field and also need to operate in
their local language.
Medical researchers have to process an enormous amount of the literature – PubMed adds about half a million paper to its index each year. Literature search and reasoning is demanding, because of the need to revealing and maintaining many complex
relationships between numerous sets of entities. In order to alleviate the efforts of biomedical research related to literature we seek a novel conception to information management, combining ontology-driven with bottom-up approaches.

Goals:
The workshop is funded by the BIMDANUBE project (http://www.bimdanube.eu), which aims at building a network of researchers and medical professionals in the Danube states and across all Europe. While the main purpose is to get to know each other and to
foster exchange, we also target a major grant application in the EU H2020 framework in 2019, and are actively looking for partners form research and industry.

Venue:
The workshop will take place at the University of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. "University of Hamburg is the biggest research and education institution in Northern Germany and one of the most extensive universities in Germany. ...with affiliated
institutes and research centres spread around the city state." [Wikipedia]

Publication:
Abstracts or extended abstracts will be published in post-workshop proceedings. Details will be provided in the future.

Be part of this exciting opportunity! Contribute to the next generation of biomedical information management!
Please find more information at http://www.bimdanube.eu/#ws1, register at http://www.bimdanube.eu/ws1-registration.html, or submit your inquiries to Steffen Remus (<remus@informatik.uni-hamburg.de>). Looking forward to your participation.

Workshop organizers:
* Chris Biemann, University of Hamburg, Germany
* Andreas Holzinger, Medical University Graz and Vienna University of Technology, Austria
* Ljiljana Majnarić, University of Osijek, Croatia
* Svetla Boytcheva, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
* Steffen Remus (local chair), University of Hamburg, Germany

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