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Friday
Workshop Announcement:
This workshop will investigate modern combinatorial and algorithmic methods of group testing, with emphasis on connections to coding theory and combinatorial design. To identify all positive cases in a large population of items, group testing proceeds by grouping the items into subsets, testing if a subset contains at least one positive item, and then identifying all positive items through iteration of group tests. The theory of group testing arose via testing millions of World War II military draftees for syphilis and it is very relevant to schemes for large-scale blood testing for viruses such as HIV. Group testing also arises in connection with the mapping of genomes. Here, we have a long list of molecular sequences, form a library of subsequences (clones), and test whether or not a particular sequence (a probe) appears in the library by testing to see which clones it appears in. Because clone libraries can be huge, we do this by pooling the clones into groups. We will investigate both epidemiological and molecular biological applications of group testing.
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Call for Participation:
This workshop is organized for the study on theory of group testing and applications, especially applications in biology and medical science. Therefore, organizers are interested in a wide variety of contributed papers involving topics such as combinatorial pooling designs, decoding algorithms, probabilistic analysis methods, random designs, as well as new models from epidemiological and molecular biological applications. There will be ample opportunity for informal discussions and the exploration of new research ideas. Proposals for contributed talks should be directed to [email protected].
Contrtibuted papers should include a title as well as a short abstract. All submissions will be acknowledged no later than April 15, 2006.