Hagit Shatkay is an assistant professor in the School of Computing, at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Her research is in the area of machine learning as it applies to biomedical data mining. She has been an active member of the bio-text research community since its early days (1999), where her work focuses primarily on biomedical information retrieval, and on the integration of text into the biological data mining process. Prior to joining Queen's University, she was an Informatics Research scientist with the Informatics Research group at Celera/Applied Biosystems, and before that a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). She holds a BSc and MSc in Computer Science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a PhD in Computer Science from Brown University, where she worked on learning probabilistic models for robot navigation.

Lynette Hirschman

Lynette Hirschman is Chief Scientist and Director, Biomedical Informatics for the Information Technology Center at the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, MA, USA. She has been one of the organizers of the BioLINK SIG on Text Mining in Biology for ISMB starting in 2002, and an organizer of the 2004 and 2005 workshops on Text Mining in Biology for the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics). During 2003-2004, Dr. Hirschman worked with an international group of collaborators to organize BioCreAtIvE (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction for Biology), the first Challenge Evaluation of automatic curation for various biological databases (SWISS-PROT, FlyBase, SGD, MGI).

Alfonso Valencia

Alfonso Valencia is the leader of the Protein Design Group of the National Center for Biotechnology and Director of the Spanish Bioinformatics Institute. His group works in the use of genomics for the study of molecular evolution using Computational Biology methods. biological resources. In the field of text mining his group has developed method for detection of protein- function and protein interaction in the context of other biological resources. He is a co-organizer of the BioLINK SIG on Text Mining in Biology for ISMB (2002-2006) and the BioCreAtIvE (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction for Biology) challenge (2004). He is executive editor of the journal "Bioinformatics" and co-chair of the text mining area for ISMB06.

Christian Blaschke

Christian Blaschke is Chief Scientific Officer and leader of the text mining projects in bioalma, Madrid, Spain. He obtained his PhD in the Group of Alfonso Valencia and was part of the organization of BioLINK SIG meetings starting in 2002. His academic work has been focused on text mining applied to molecular biology and biomedicine where he contributed in the areas of protein-protein interactions, DNA array analysis and automatic ontology learning. Christian Blaschke was also one of the organizers of the BioCreAtIvE (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction for Biology) challenge carried out in 2004.