Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology

 

Special Issue on: "Secure and Distributed Big Data Analysis"

Guest Editor:
Alexander Senf, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), UK

Effective big data analysis depends on access to large and high-quality data sets. Advances in genome sequencing technology increasingly delivers these data sets. Sequencing projects such as the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC, 300TB) and UK10K (100 TB) produce data sets whose size already poses challenges on many analysis platforms; the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) project already aims to analyse data on the Petabyte scale.

Additionally, data sets of high clinical importance are typically access controlled, placing limits not only on who can use this data, but also on the environment in which this data may be used, to maintain privacy and confidentiality requirements. There is also a growing amount of data held by private institutions, for example by pharmaceutical companies. This data often cannot be made public as a matter of corporate interest; however, some of the data may still be available for analysis in special circumstances or for special collaborations.

The analysis problem that emerges from this developing data landscape is one where the analysis algorithm needs to be able move towards the data, instead of expecting to have the data available locally. It requires the algorithm to perform analysis in individual steps, on globally dispersed data, in heterogeneous computing environments, potentially on encrypted data, while maintaining confidentiality and privacy agreements in place for the data.

For this special issue, we are soliciting submissions for a thematic collection of technical papers and research and commentary articles that explore the frontier of research and practice in this field.

Subject Coverage
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Algorithms and bioinformatics
• Networking and communications
• Computer architecture and real-time systems
• Database and data mining
• Security and information assurance
• Distributed and parallel systems and algorithms
• Software engineering
• Embedded systems and software
• Web and internet computing
• Grid and scalable computing
• Intelligent information and database systems

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper has been completely re-written and if appropriate written permissions have been obtained from any copyright holders of the original paper).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process.

All papers must be submitted online. To submit a paper, please read our Submitting articles page.

If you have any queries concerning the special issue, please email the Guest Editor, Alexander Senf, at asenf@ebi.ac.uk

Important Dates

Manuscripts due by: 1 February, 2016

Notification to authors: 28 March, 2016

Final versions due by: 30 May, 2016