Critical Assessment of Microarray Data Analysis Contest Datasets Emerald Dataset : a Microarray Experiment to Study the Relative Magnitudes of Technical and Biological Variation Talks Keynote towards Cracking the Code of Transcription and Chromatin Regulation Analysis of Comparative Genomic Hybridiz

Vienna, December 4 th-6 th PROCEEDINGS WHAT IS CAMDA? CAMDA (1,2) was founded to provide a forum to critically assess different techniques used in microarray data analysis. It aims to establish the state-of-the-art in microarray data analysis, as well as identify progress and highlight promising directions for future efforts. In order to achieve these goals, CAMDA adopted the approach of community-wide experiment, letting the scientific community analyse the same contest data sets. Researchers worldwide are invited to take the CAMDA challenge. Accepted contributinos are presented in short talks (25 mins), and the results of analysis are discussed and compared at the CAMDA conference. Posters provide an additional opportunity of presenting and discussing work. As a special opportunity, this year, a selection of analysis predictions will also be verified experimentally by the laboratory collecting the original contest data set. CAMDA, which began in 2000, was initiated by Simon Lin and Kimberly Johnson from the Duke University Bioinformatics Shared Resource. It is patterned after the molecular modeling community's well-known CASP (3) experiment. In this sense, CAMDA is a functional genomics successor of the other well-known community-wide experiments, such as GASP (4) in genomics, CASP (3) in protein modeling, GAW (5) in statistical genetics, and PTC (6) in computational toxicology. The first CAMDA conference (CAMDA'00) was held December 18–19, 2000. Attended by 250 biologists, statisticians, computer scientists and mathematicians from 7 countries, the conference truly brought together the major players in this field. Since then the CAMDA conference has grown stronger and more exciting, and has regularly been featured in top journals such as the Nature (1,2) and a recent Nature Methods editorial (7). Come join this exciting conference! In 2006 it was decided that CAMDA would become a roving conference. This new period begins with Camda 2007, organised by Joaquin Dopazo at the CIPF in Spain, the first stop in the forecoming years of international roving. This year, Boku University will host CAMDA in Vienna, Austria. All individuals and groups from both academic and commercial entities are invited to join the award competition. Primary dataset The laboratories of Prof. Cristin Print and collaborators make available raw and processed data from a small microarray gene expression time-course experiment that is typical of gene expression time-course data sets yet provides an unusual opportunity for pushing the performance of analysis methods. The experiment recorded the response of human vascular endothelial cells to serum withdrawal, triggering …