Deriving insight from the ever increasing amounts of data rapidly being generated in the lab by the latest high throughput methods forms one of the grand challenges in the modern life sciences. This is increasingly recognized, e.g., in the recent federal Big Data initiative in the United States. While the computational analysis of large data sets has emerged as one of the scientific key techniques in the post genomic era, the well known “data analysis bottleneck” limits the efficient translation of large-scale data collection into novel medical and biological insights. In recent years, the growing need for the analysis of massive data sets has further been intensified with the establishment of high throughput sequencing technologies and the increasing size of biomedical studies.

CAMDA focuses on the analysis of massive data sets in life sciences. It introduces and evaluates new approaches and solutions to the Big Data problem. The conference presents new techniques in the field of bioinformatics, data analysis, and statistics for the handling and processing large data sets, the combination of multiple data sources, and computational inference. Both both challenges unique to the field (“curse of dimensionality”) and generic to the analysis of large data sets are being covered.

Rather than being a closed-form contest, focusing on a particular data type, or covering implementation / hardware issues, CAMDA is run as an open-ended data analysis challenge and focuses on big heterogeneous data sets. Academic and industrial researchers worldwide are invited to take the CAMDA challenge. Accepted contributions are presented in short talks (30 mins), and the results of analyses are discussed and compared at the CAMDA conference. Both contestants and other interested researchers are welcome at the meeting. Posters can provide an additional opportunity of presenting and discussing work. All individuals and groups from both academic and commercial entities are invited to join the award competition.

CAMDA has a track record as a well-recognized annual meeting going back to the year 2000. It soon received considerable attention from high impact journals like Nature (1,2) and was featured in an editorial in Nature Methods in 2008 (3). Recently called the 'Olympics for Genomics', this allusion indicates the ambitious and wide-ranging nature of the contest. The meeting has regularly been supported by organizations like EMERALD, the FDA, and the NIST.

Come join us this year, we are look forward to your participation!

There are two mailing lists associated with this conference,

• a low-volume announcements mailing list, and
• an open forum for participants' free discussions relating to the contest data sets.

References:

1. Johnson, K.F. and Lin, S.M. (2001). Call to work together on microarray data analysis. Nature 411, 885.
2. Tilstone, C. (2003). Vital Statistics. Nature 424, 610
3. Editorial feature (2008). Going for algorithm gold, Nature Methods 5, 569. (link to journal)