Welcome Message

The International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB 2019) will be held at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) in autumn 2019.

In systems biology, it has recently become possible to measure genome and transcriptome expression on a large scale with high accuracy using next-generation sequencing and other technologies. We are entering the era of big biological data, including data about proteomes and metabolomes, genomes and transcriptomes. These days, big data analysis is required not only in the field of natural science, but also in various other fields such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

One of the major themes of ICSB 2019 is “Systems Biology meets AI.” We will invite two keynote speakers: Dr. Lily Peng from Google, who has succeeded in predicting cardiovascular risk factors using deep learning as a pioneer in machine intelligence, and Dr. Hiroaki Kitano from the Systems Biology Institute (SBI), who has quickly adopted AI in systems biology. We also plan to invite a number of young international researchers who seek to apply machine learning and AI to systems biology as speakers at luncheon seminars, in order to make ICSB 2019 the first international conference that maps out the direction of next-generation systems biology.

ICSB is one of the largest international conferences on systems biology. Since the first conference in Tokyo in 2000, which was organized by Dr. Hiroaki Kitano, it has been held annually in different countries. ICSB 2019 will be the first time in 12 years that the conference has been held in Japan since ICSB 2006 at Pacifico Yokohama. We hope that this conference in Okinawa will become an epoch-making conference that creates a great research trend transcending the conventional framework of systems biology, by encouraging the participation of researchers from the field of AI through the theme “Systems Biology meets AI.”

We are looking forward to your participation and contributions.

Tadashi Yamamoto (OIST / JST)
Conference Chair