VISUALIZATION IN MEDICINE AND LIFE SCIENCES 2009
			           (VMLS 2009)
		       - Progress and New Challenges -

to be held  
  		              July 22-24, 2009
in
	      	      Bremerhaven, Germany.

After the successful first workshop 2006 in Binz (Ruegen), Germany, and 
many requests to consider a second workshop, we decided to organize this 
second one. 

We will send invitations to experts in the field asking for their
participation. At the same time, we want to open the workshop to young, 
innovative researchers such that we decided to also send out a call for
abstracts, on which decisions for participation will be based. 
Invitations and call for abstracts will be send out at a later point. 
This e-mail should alert you of the upcoming event. At this point, 
we would like to ask you to mark your calendars. 


CONTENT

Medicine has a long tradition as an application area for visualization
techniques. Still, it poses many open questions and medical visualization 
is a vivid research field. One reason for holding the first VMLS workshop 
was that newly emerged technologies in the field of life sciences and the
question whether the medical visualization approaches can be adopted for 
the new visualization challenges for life sciences data. Life sciences is 
meant in its broadest meaning including (animal and human) biology, 
biochemistry, bioinformatics, biomathematics, food sciences, environmental 
sciences, and pharmaceutics. Different data collection technologies lead 
to different types of data including both spatial and non-spatial data. 

The aim of the second international VMLS workshop is to document and 
discuss the progress that has been made since the first workshop and to 
discover what new challenges have come up in these research endeavors. 
We want to analyze which goals have been met and why certain goals have 
not been met. We want to (re-)direct the visualization efforts in a 
desirable direction from an application perspective. Also, we want to 
encourage interaction among participants in the spirit of establishing 
new collaborations. 

Participants will have the opportunity to present their work and ideas,
approaches, or  concepts in one of the presentation sessions. 
Presentations should focus on visualization applied or applicable to data 
from medicine, or life sciences in general. In addition, we plan on having 
several discussion sessions as well as a social program with many 
discussion opportunities.  


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

We are going to invite distinguished speakers from the medical and life
science area. It will be of a significant value to our discussion sessions 
to have such scientists from the application areas participate. They can 
judge best what insight visualization can and should provide.


PROCEEDINGS

All participants will be invited to submit a workshop-related paper after 
the workshop. Papers will be peer-reviewed. The proceedings of the first 
VMLS workshop were published as a hard-cover book by Springer-Verlag in 
the high-quality \"Mathematics+Visualization\" series. Springer already 
indicated that they are willing to do the same for this second workshop. 


LOCATION

The workshop will be held at the Atlantic Hotel Sail City in Bremerhaven,
Germany. The hotel is in the heart of the inner/outer harbor tourist resort 
at the Weser dike and lido, where the Weser river enters the North Sea. 
The new hotel building has become the new landmark of Bremerhaven. It is 
also located in the center of the city right next to the shopping malls and 
the recently established leisure and business concept \"havenwelten\".  
http://www.atlantic-hotels.de/sailcity/hotel/

WEBSITE

Please visit our website
http://www.faculty.jacobs-university.de/llinsen/vmls/2009
for more details and for frequently updated information concerning the
workshop. 


Sincerely,

Lars Linsen, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany
Hans Hagen, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
Bernd Hamann, University of California, Davis, U.S.A.
Hans-Christian Hege, Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), Germany

Co-organizers