Edinburgh Napier University

  The rapidly expanding field of biology creates enormous challenges for computational visualization techniques for enabling researchers to gain insight from their large and highly complex data sets. The goal of the BioVis 2011 symposium is to create the premier international and interdisciplinary event for all aspects of visualization in biology. The symposium brings together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and engaging visualization researchers in problems in biological data visualization, as well as bioinformatics and biology researchers in state-of-the-art visualization research. The symposium also serves as a platform for researchers in biology and bioinformatics to share pressing visualization challenges and potential solutions in their fields, to initiate interdisciplinary collaborations and to provide an outlet and training ground for young and freshly minted visualization researchers with a keen interest in problems of biology. Given the goal of bringing together members of the biology, bioinformatics, and visualization communities for discussion, the symposium solicitation was purposefully broad and open-minded to diverse types and lengths of submissions. Authors were encouraged to self-identify the intent of their submission. Types of submissions included detailed reports of original research, highlights about relevant previously published work with some additional insight, descriptions of work in progress and preliminary results, experience reports, and demonstrations of new systems. Submissions fell in two categories: (i) papers, describing high-quality research that is not necessarily fully completed but offers some new insight; (ii) abstracts, highlighting relevant work, with a poster, demo, or video presentation. Papers These proceedings contain 20 papers selected from 54 submissions (37% acceptance) describing state-of-the-art tools, techniques, and technology in the field of biological data visualization. The submitted papers were assigned to program committee members based on a match of paper topic and committee member expertise. Each paper was reviewed for novelty and contribution by at least three program committee members. For each paper, experts from both the visualization and biology / bioinformatics communities were involved in the review process. When all reviews were completed, a discussion phase was opened where reviewers of each paper could anonymously exchange their opinions with an opportunity to adapt their reviews and/or scores. The paper chairs then finalized the decisions on which papers to accept, based on the numerical scores, the detailed reviewer comments, and the discussion board messages.