CAMDA (1,2) was founded to provide a forum to critically assess different techniques used in microarray data analysis. It aims to establish the state-of-the-art in microarray data analysis, as well as identify progress and highlight promising directions for future efforts. In order to achieve these goals, CAMDA adopted the approach of community-wide experiment, letting the scientific community analyze the same contest data sets. Researchers worldwide are invited to take the CAMDA challenge. Accepted contributions are presented in short talks (25 mins), and the results of analysis are discussed and compared at the CAMDA conference. Posters provide an additional opportunity of presenting and discussing work. As a special opportunity, this year, a selection of analysis predictions will also be verified experimentally by the laboratory collecting the original contest data set.

CAMDA, which began in 2000, was initiated by Simon Lin and Kimberly Johnson from the Duke University Bioinformatics Shared Resource. It is patterned after the molecular modeling community’s well-known CASP (3) experiment. In this sense, CAMDA is a functional genomics successor of the other well-known community-wide experiments, such as GASP (4) in genomics, CASP (3) in protein modeling, GAW (5) in statistical genetics, and PTC (6) in computational toxicology.

The first CAMDA conference (CAMDA'00) was held December 18–19, 2000. Attended by 250 biologists, statisticians, computer scientists and mathematicians from seven countries, the conference truly brought together the major players in this field. Since then the CAMDA conference has grown stronger and more exciting, and has regularly been featured in top journals such as the Nature (1,2) and a recent Nature Methods editorial (7). Come join us this year!

In 2006 it was decided that CAMDA would become a roving conference. This new period began with Camda 2007, organized by Joaquin Dopazo at the CIPF in Spain, the first stop in the forecoming years of international roving. In 2009, CAMDA was run by Simon Lin in Chicago. In 2011, Boku University hosted CAMDA in Vienna, Austria. This year, CAMDA takes place in Long Beach, California, and will run as an official Satellite meeting to ISMB 2012. All individuals and groups from both academic and commercial entities are invited to join the award competition.

There are two mailing lists associated with this conference,

• a low-volume announcements mailing list, and
• an open forum for participants' free discussions relating to the contest data sets.

We look forward to your participation!

1. Johnson, K.F. and Lin, S.M. (2001). Call to work together on microarray data analysis. Nature 411, 885.
2. Tilstone, C. (2003) Vital Statistics. Nature 424, 610
3. CASP: Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction. http://predictioncenter.llnl.gov
4. GASP: Genome Annotation Assessment Project. http://www.fruitfly.org/GASP1
5. GAW: Genetic Analysis Workshop. http://www.sfbr.org/gaw/
6. C. Helma, R. D. King, S. Kramer, and A. Srinivasan (2001). The Predictive Toxicology Challenge 2000–-2001. Bioinformatics 17, 107.
7. (2008) Going for algorithm gold, Nature Methods 5, 569. (link to journal)