Preface

This volume contains the papers that were presented at Genome Informatics Workshop 1995, held at the Pacific Convention Plaza in Yokohama on December 11th and 12th, 1995. It was the sixth annual workshop organized by the Genome Informatics Research Project (Minoru Kanehisa, Principal Investigator), supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (MESSC) of Japan. As the five-year project officially ends in the academic year of 1995, this workshop is considered a milestone of the research area of genome informatics, summarizing the five-year activity of the project.
Like the last workshop in 1994, this one was also divided into Oral Sessions, Workstation Sessions, Poster Sessions, and Invited Lectures. In this workshop, we invited the following leading researchers in genome informatics and related areas: Michael Ashburner (University of Cambridge), Yoshiki Hotta (University of Tokyo), Richard Karp (University of Washington), David Lipman (National Center for Biotechnology Information), and Yuzuru Tanaka (Hokkaido University).
The Oral Sessions consist of fully refereed papers. They were judged under the usual refereeing process; each paper was reviewed by two or more referees including program committee members, and the final decision was made by the whole committee. There were 11 submissions to the Oral Sessions and from them 9 were selected. The number of submissions to the Oral Sessions was not large. This was due to the reputation of the rigorous refereeing process of the previous workshops and particularly due to the low acceptance ratio of the last one. Thus most of the submitted papers were already with high quality at the submission time. The accepted papers in the Oral Sessions ranged from the field of algorithms to that of databases, well reflecting the current status of the research area.
Papers for the Workstation and Poster Sessions were not reviewed. As in the previous workshops, these sessions served as a place to discuss new research directions, works in progress, practical aspects of softwares, and other innovative concepts.
The program committee wishes to thank all who directly or indirectly supported the workshop, including the reviewers of the papers for the Oral Sessions, and those who helped prepare the final manuscripts in this volume.
The Program Committee of Genome Informatics Workshop 1995 consisted of Masami Hagiya (University of Tokyo, chairman), Satoru Miyano (Kyushu University), Kenta Nakai (Osaka University), Akira Suyama (University of Tokyo), Toshihisa Takagi (University of Tokyo), and Takashi Yokomori (University of Electro-Communications).

Masami Hagiya
University of Tokyo