Preface

The Fourteenth International Conference on Genome Informatics (GIW 2003) was held at Yokohama Pacifico in Yokohama, Japan, during December 14-17, 2003. The specific feature of this year is that two meetings were held in association with GIW 2003: The First Annual Symposium of Association of Asian Societies for Bioinformatics (AASBi 2003) which was organized as a part of GIW 2003 by Japanese Society for Bioinformatics (JSBi) on December 14 and the 30th Anniversary of the Information Criterion (AIC 2003) which was organized by Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 14-17, 2003.
  Genome Informatics Vol. 14 is edited from papers presented at GIW 2003. The program committee of GIW 2003 received 44 papers for oral presentation. Each submitted paper was reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. We have selected 25 papers from them for presentation at this conference. We thank the program committee members to their efforts in this selection process.
  GIW 2003 has invited three keynote speakers. Dr. Hirotugu Akaike, the former director of Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Dr. Charles DeLisi of Boston University and Dr. Michael Zuker of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In addition to these 25 peer reviewed accepted papers, the abstracts of 201 poster presentations and 16 software demonstrations are included in this volume. The poster presentations and software demonstrations were selected by the editors for relevance to the scope of GIW 2003 and were not formally reviewed. Furthermore, this volume also contains the abstracts of the invited talks presented at the First Annual Symposium of Association of Asian Societies for Bioinformatics.
  The electronic version of Genome Informatics Vol. 14 will be available from the Japanese Society for Bioinformatics (http://www.jsbi.org/journal.html). The peer reviewed accepted papers for oral presentation will soon be indexed by Medline.

Michael Gribskov
Minoru Kanehisa
Program Committee Co-Chairs

Acknowledgments
GIW 2003 is supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas (C) ``Genome Information Science'' from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan and JSBi. The poster and software demonstration session of GIW 2003 was held as the annual meeting of JSBi and GIW 2003 was organized with the help of Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University and Human Genome Center, Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo. Special thanks are due to the GIW secretary office members for this excellent work, especially, Asako Suzuki, Ayako Brecht-Tomiyasu, Mizuho Wada, Seiya Imoto, and Hideo Bannai.