Preface

At this first year of the new millennium, GIW has changed its name to the ``International Conference on Genome Informatics,'' while keeping GIW as its acronym. In the ``post-genome'' era, after the completion of the draft sequence of the human genome, we are faced with an explosion of new information. The role of genome informatics has moved from theory to practice toward a comprehensive and systematic understanding of life. This volume of Genome Informatics is edited from papers presented at Yebisu Garden Place in Tokyo, Japan, from December 17-19, 2001. The program committee of GIW 2001 received 49 papers for oral presentation. Each submitted paper was considered by an average of 5 and a minimum of 3 members of the program committee. Based on the reports from the committee members, the 22 papers in this volume were accepted for presentation at the conference. In addition, 130 poster presentations and 6 software demonstrations are accepted for presentation. The poster presentations and software demonstrations were reviewed by the editors (Hideo Matsuda, Limsoon Wong, Satoru Miyano, and Toshihisa Takagi) for relevance. The abstracts of the accepted posters presentations and demonstrations are included in this book. This book also contains abstracts from the two invited speakers: David Eisenberg of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Charles Lawrence of the Wardworth Center. David Eisenberg discussed "Protein interactions". Charles Lawrence spoke on the topic of "New data driven research paradigm for the post genome era''. Please note that the electronic version of Genome Informatics 2001 will be available from the Japanese Society for Bioinformatics (http://www.jsbi.org/journal.html). The accepted papers for oral presentation will soon be indexed by Medline. We look forward to a full and interesting conference.

Hideo Matsuda
Limsoon Wong
Program Committee Co-Chairs