Invitation To A Dance

When you're a writer, there are certain milestones that help to reassue you that you really are a really-real for real writer:

When you're first sending out manuscripts, one of those milestones is a personal rejection note from an editor, rather than a form letter.

Your first story sale is a big milestone.

But your second sale is almost as important, or maybe even more so, because it tells you that first sale wasn't just a fluke.

And another milestone is when you've established enough of a reputation, that an editor will actually invite you (yes, YOU, you writer, you) to contribute something to his or her project.

So I opened up a recent email to find that that last had finally happened to me.

Well, sort of....

International Conference on
COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN SYSTEMS BIOLOGY

20th and 21st September 2007
Edinburgh, Scotland
http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/cmsb07/

The CMSB (Computational Methods in Systems Biology) conference series was established in 2003 to help catalyze the convergence of modellers, physicists, mathematicians, and theoretical computer scientists from fields such as language design, concurrency theory, program verification, and molecular biologists, physicians, neuroscientists interested in a systems-level understanding of cellular physiology and
pathology.

CMSB'07 solicits original research articles (including significant works-in-progress), surveys of current research and posters. These may cover theoretical or applied contributions that are motivated by a biological question and can demonstrate either actual or potential usefulness towards answering that question. They may also cover models of computation inspired by biological processes; the motivation may be as much computational as biological. Particularly relevant case studies and open issues from the biological side that demands modeling of systems are of interest as well. The introduction of formal models should be supported by theoretical arguments about the model and/or on the analyses that they enable, by comparisons with other network models, and/or by examples of representation and analysis of a biological system.


Topics of interest include, among others:

1. Biological systems and networks: inference, properties, modeling, dynamics, simulation and reverse engineering
2. Formal methods for drug discovery and design
3. Methods to predict biological network behavior from incomplete information
4. Models including symbolic evolution and learning
5. Models of self-assembly
6. Detailed case-studies on how a biological question was successfully addressed using formal models
7. Emergence of properties in complex biological systems
8. Theoretical comparisons between different formal models of cellular processes
9. Differential, discrete and/or stochastic modeling-language frameworks
10. Quantitative formal languages
11. Biologically-inspired extensions to concurrency theory, constraint programming, logical methods or language equivalences
12. Computer models in nano-sciences applied to biological domains
13. Definition and study of theoretical properties of biologically-inspired formal languages
14. Biological data bases and exchange formats for biological data and standards


Paper and poster submission guidelines

Authors are invited to submit original research papers or survey papers of no more than 15 pages in PDF format using the LNCS templates, available at the url below

http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-164-2-72376-0,00.html

Hoo, boy, how did I (who had less than two years of college, almost all in Humanities type courses) end up on a mailing list inviting papers for a scientific conference?

(Some of the subjects of the conference sound like they might be interesting, though I'd probably need to have a translator at hand who spoke both Academic and Tech.)

I'm wondering if there's some other Bruce Arthurs with a background in biology and/or mathematics who should have received this email. I know there's a standup comic in Canada and a long-distance runner in Australia who share my name, so why not a Bruce Arthurs who's actually a hard-science geek somewhere too?

(What? Google my own name? Why, no, I'd never be that vain. Never. I have no idea why that guy in the ski mask breaks into the house every year or so, holds a gun to my head, and forces me to Google "Bruce Arthurs". Yeh, yeh, that sounds good. That's what happened. I swear it, I swear to God.)