Tetsuro Toyoda to Keynote at SWAT4LS-2011

We are delighted to announce that Tetsuro Toyoda, Director of the Bioinformatics And Systems Engineering division of RIKEN (Yokohama), Japan, will keynote at SWAT4LS 2011.

TITLE: Future Biology is Semantic Information Science
Global cloud frameworks for bioinformatics research databases become huge and heterogeneous; solutions face various diametric challenges comprising cross integration, retrieval, security and openness. To address this, as of March 2011 organizations including RIKEN published 192 mammalian, plant and protein life sciences databases having 7.5 million data records, integrated as Linked Open or Private Data (LOD/LPD) using SciNetS.org, the Scientists' Networking System or a “Virtual Laboratory Centre,” providing numerous virtual labs for semantic-web-based data management and collaboration of various purposes. SciNetS.org is thus designed to discover novel relationships between data, because automatic intelligent agent generates for each data item a summary content displaying the linked information via Semantic Web. We demonstrate we successfully used the SciNetS interface across 26 million semantic relationships for biological applications including genome design, sequence processing, inference over phenotype databases, full-text search indexing and human-readable contents like ontology and LOD tree viewers.

Tetsuro Toyoda was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1968. He graduated from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo in 1992, and obtained his PhD in 1997 from the same university. He started as a researcher at the Institute of Medical Molecular Design in 1997, and joined RIKEN as team leader in the Genomic Sciences Center in 2001. He became director of the RIKEN Bioinformatics and Systems Engineering Division when it was established in 2008. His expertise is in bioinformatics and computer-aided rational design of biomolecules, including rational database-supported drug design based on protein structural information and rational genome design in synthetic biology for biomass engineering. He promotes Japan’s database integration projects as a member of several national database committees.