The 3rd International Workshop
on Web Applications for Life Sciences

Logo WALS

17th June, 2024 hybrid (online and in Tampere, Finland)


In conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2024) - 17-20th June

Latest news

Dear WALS community, please mind that the workshop will run mostly online this year. The organizers and presenters will give their presentations online (Zoom link will be shared with all the registered ICWE participants).

For all the participants who are in Tampere at the ICWE conference, we will use a room where the Zoom meeting is broadcasted, for anyone who wants to participate. For any further detail, please visit the main conference website https://icwe2024.webengineering.org/

Program

WALS session will be led on Monday June 17th, 11:00-12:30 (UTC+3, Helsinki Time). See the complete ICWE conference general program here.

11:00-11:10
Welcome and introduction to the workshop

11.10-11.35
Danilo Danese, Tommaso Di Noia, Angela Lombardi, Domenico Lofù, Fatemeh Nazary, Rodolfo Sardone and Paolo Sorino:
Integrating eXplainable AI in Healthcare: A Web Application Framework for Advancing the One Health Paradigm.

11.35-12.00
Jesús Carreño Bolufer, José Fabián Reyes Román, Rubén Cabrera Beyrouti and Juan Carlos Casamayor Rodenas:
AGC-MAC: A Conceptual Model-based Platform for the Management and Analysis of Clinical Data of Retina-Macula Diseases.

12.00-12.25
Carmelo Ardito, Tommaso Colafiglio, Tommaso Di Noia, Domenico Lofù, Fedelucio Narducci, Paolo Sorino and Angela Lombardi:
Towards a Neurofeedback Tool For Emotion Recognition Using Brain Computer Interface.

12.25-12.30
Closing remarks

About

The recent advances in unraveling the secrets of human conditions and diseases have encouraged new paradigms for their diagnosis and treatment. In addition, the recent pandemics have brought increasing attention toward the genetic mechanisms of viruses and infected hosts. The information related to these phenomena is increasing at unprecedented rates, directly impacting the design and development of data management pipelines and their applications. New ways of processing and exposing data and knowledge on the Web in healthcare and life sciences environments are thus strongly needed.

The WALS workshop, at its third edition, aims at being a meeting forum for Web Engineering, Data Management, and Bioinformatics researchers working on life sciences problems, offering the opportunity to share, discuss and find new approaches to support Search, Knowledge Extraction, and Data Science on the Web, thereby achieving important results for healthcare, precision medicine, biology, genomics, and virology.

The workshop welcomes submissions of fresh investigations and demonstrations concerning conceptual, experimental, and applied studies of life sciences problems on the Web. Directions of particular interest include: 1) monitoring and adaptation of Web Engineering techniques for life sciences; 2) design and engineering of Web applications for resolving life sciences problems; 3) development of crowdsourcing and collaborative strategies for life sciences data curation, integration, and discovery.

Topics of interest

The workshop focuses on Web Engineering as a means for facing the challenges that emerge when designing and developing applications for life sciences, focused on several branches such as healthcare, precision medicine, molecular biology, genomics, and virology. The workshop is not restricted to particular research methods, and we will consider conceptual, empirical, and applied research (including practical demonstrations). The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Web applications modeling and engineering for genomics
  • Web applications for the management of electronic/digital health records (EHR)
  • Web user interfaces for genomics, virology, or molecular biology
  • Development of Web systems for Precision Medicine
  • Web services for exploration of life sciences databases and knowledge graphs
  • Biological knowledge extraction
  • Genomic big data analytics
  • Web crowdsourcing methods for life sciences data curation and annotation
  • Information visualization and exploratory analysis methods for biology
  • Data science applications to healthcare and biology on the Web
  • Semantic Web knowledge representation for genomics
  • Life sciences Semantic Web applications
  • Biomedical ontologies engineering
  • Interoperability of health information systems and databases on the Web
  • Web Engineering techniques for FAIRification of biological datasets
  • COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 tracking via Web applications

Paper submission guidelines

We invite submissions of high quality papers describing original and unpublished results regarding any of the workshop’s topics of interest.

Accepted papers will be included in the post-workshop proceedings to appear in Springer's CCIS series, as per the usual tradition of the ICWE conference joint events (see last year's ICWE 2023 Workshops).

The authors must submit manuscripts using the Springer-Verlag LNCS style for Lecture Notes in Computer Science. For style files and details, see the page https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines. The workshop will accept two types of contributions:

  • Full papers - maximum 12 pages including references
  • Short/demo papers - maximum 6 pages including references

Papers must be submitted as PDF files using EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wals24.

To ensure high quality, all papers will be thoroughly peer reviewed by the Program Committee. Manuscripts not submitted in the LNCS style or having more than 12 pages will be automatically rejected. The papers need to be original and not submitted or accepted for publication in any other workshop, conference, or journal.

For each accepted paper, at least one author must attend the workshop and present the paper. Registration is subject to the terms and conditions of ICWE.

Main contact: pietro.pinoli@polimi.it

Important dates (AoE)

  • Paper submission deadline: April 14th, 2024 EXTENDED to April 28th, 2024 !!!
  • Notification deadline: May 5th, 2024 EXTENDED to May 10th, 2024
  • Registration deadline: May 17th, 2024
  • Workshop day: June 17th, 2024
  • Camera-ready deadline: July 20th, 2024

Registration

Please refer to the main conference website here. At least one of the authors for each accepted paper must have a Regular Registration" and attend the workshop day, for paper presentation.

Organizers

pietropinoli
Pietro Pinoli
Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering - Politecnico di Milano, Italy
pietro.pinoli@polimi.it

Pietro Pinoli works as Research Fellow and lecturer at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He received his PhD cum laude in 2017, with a thesis titled “Modeling and Querying Genomic Data” where he proposed and benchmarked data structures and algorithms to manage, search and elaborate huge collections of genomic datasets, by means of cloud and distributed technologies. He has been visiting PhD candidate at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, US). His research interests include bioinformatics and computational biology, data bases and data management, big data technology and algorithms, machine learning and natural language processing, and drug repurposing.

annabernasconi
Anna Bernasconi
Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering - Politecnico di Milano, Italy
anna.bernasconi@polimi.it

Anna Bernasconi is a Research Fellow at the Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano and has been Visiting Research Fellow at Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. Her research areas are Bioinformatics, Databases, and Data Science, where she applies conceptual modeling, data integration, and knowledge engineering in several life sciences and other applied sciences domains, with a focus on building open-source tools and services. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, her research has moved to viral genomics, by building models, databases, and Web search systems for viral sequences and their variants. She co-organized and chaired the first four International Workshops on Conceptual Modeling for Life Sciences (CMLS 2020 through 2023) and the first three International Workshops on Web Applications for Life Sciences (WALS 2022 through 2024) co-located with the ICWE conference.

silviacascianelli
Silvia Cascianelli
Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering - Politecnico di Milano, Italy
silvia.cascianelli@polimi.it

Silvia Cascianelli is a PhD Candidate in Information Technology at the Politecnico di Milano - Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering, under the supervision of Prof. Marco Masseroli. Her research interests include Data Science, Machine Learning and Network-based strategies with applications to Oncogenomics, Computational Biology and Health domains. She is currently a visiting researcher at the University of Lausanne, in Prof. Giovanni Ciriello's Computational Systems Oncology lab. She participates in the Italian PRIN ARTUSI (Actionable Reciprocal TUmour-Stroma Interactions) and collaborates with the Candiolo Cancer Institute (Torino) and with Alliance Against Cancer, the Italian Oncology Network.

albertogarcia
Alberto García S.
Valencian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain.
algarsi3@pros.upv.es

Alberto García S. obtained his Ph.D. cum laude at Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under the supervision of Prof. Oscar Pastor. He is currently a researcher at the VRAIN research institute, where he focuses on conceptual modeling, data science, and User Interface design. He has participated in multiple research projects in collaboration with clinicians and geneticists to generate knowledge from genomics data effectively and efficiently.



Program Committee

  • José Alberto Benítez-Andrades, University of León
  • Pietro Cinaglia, University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro
  • Stefano Cirillo Cinaglia, Universita degli Studi di Salerno
  • Andrea Colombo, Politecnico di Milano
  • Yashar Deldjoo, Polytechnic University of Bari
  • Rafael García Luque, University of Málaga
  • Domenico Lofù, Politecnico di Bari
  • Marianna Milano, University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro
  • Oscar Pastor, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • José Fabián Reyes Román, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • Paolo Sorino, Polytechnic University of Bari