RECOMB '02: Proceedings of the sixth annual international conference on Computational biology

The papers in this volume were presented at the Sixth Annual International Conference on Computational Biology RECOMB 2002, held in Washington, D.C. on April 18-21, 2002. The RECOMB series was started in 1997 by Sorin Istrail, Pavel Pevzner and Michael Waterman. RECOMB '99 took place in Lyon, France, RECOMB 2000 was held in Tokyo, Japan, and RECOMB 2001 was held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.This year's call for papers gave rise to 118 submissions, out of which the program committee selected 35 papers to be presented at the conference and included in the proceedings. Each submission was refereed by at least three members of the program committee. After the completion of the referees' reports, an extensive web-based discussion took place.RECOMB 2002 had 8 invited speakers: Ruben Abagyan (The Scripps Research Institute), Ali H. Brivanlou (Rockefeller University), Evan Eichler (Case Western Reserve University), Harold "Skip" Garner (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas), David Ho (Rockefeller University), Gerry Rubin (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), J. Craig Venter (Celera) and Marc Vidal (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute). The Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture was given by J. Craig Venter. The Distinguished Biology Lecture was given by David Ho. The Distinguished New Technologies Lecture was given by Harold Garner.Complete final versions of many of the papers presented in the conference will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Biology, which is closely affiliated with the conference.