• Kiyoshi Asai (Computational Biology Research Center, Japan)
• Charles Cantor (Sequenom, Inc., USA)

The idea of life sciences tutorials is to explain important, pressing, hot problems in the area in easy terms in the language of the area (not in mathematical terms), and, if possible, survey past and current approaches and their success or failure to solve these problems by mathematical methods. The goal of these tutorials is to stimulate the symbolic computation people in the audience to come up with good models and appropriate solution methods and to discuss these ideas with the life scientists.

Conversely, the idea of symbolic computation tutorials is to explain the currently most important and successful methods in symbolic computation (in a broad sense) in easy terms with the emphasis put on describing the problems these methods solve, and a few telling examples of problems in natural sciences (not only life sciences) in which these methods have been applied successfully. The goal of these tutorials is to stimulate the life scientists in the audience to see how these methods could match the problems they have.