 The origins of the ISMB conference lie in a workshop for artificial intelligence researchers with an interest in molecular biology held in November 1991 . The workshop was organised by American researcher Lawrence Hunter , then director of the Machine Learning Project at the United States National Institutes of Health 's National Library of Medicine ( NLM ) in Bethesda , Maryland . A subsequent workshop on the same topic held in 1992 , hosted by the NLM and the National Science Foundation , made it clear that a regular international conference for the field was required . Such a conference would be dedicated to molecular biology as a rapidly emerging application of artificial intelligence . Having successfully applied for grants from <unk> , NIH and the Department of Energy Office of Health and Environmental Research , the first ISMB conference was held in July 1993 , at the NLM . The conference was chaired by Hunter , David Searls ( research associate professor at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine ) and Jude <unk> ( assistant professor of computer science at University of Wisconsin – Madison ) and attracted over 200 attendees from 13 countries , submitting 69 scientific papers . 
