For the second edition of the CMM school we propose a series of courses on “Physics- and Knowledge-based methods and Visualization for real life applications”.

The motivation for this choice is that today knowledge-based methods are rapidly expanding in the area of molecular modeling and their integration with physics-based ones is becoming more and more effective.

Databases containing information on molecules and biomolecules have been growing exponentially for over a decade and are today extremely redundant. Artificial intelligence, data mining, classification techniques allow to build models from the data themselves. Therefore these models, used to simulate the dynamics of molecules of interest, are obtained without the need to specify any underlying physical laws.

The main objectives of the school are:

• to show the use of the CMM for comparison, integration and rationalisation of experimental data in real application cases;
• to illustrate the possibilities offered by the new simulation techniques, and enable the students to independently, critically and consciously use specific packages apt for the computational problems of interest; 
• to train experts in computational modeling able to support industrial and academical R&D labs, about experimental design, data interpretation and analysis and function driven discovery.

Participants will be provided with the necessary tools to:

•  understand what phenomena of interest may be studied with CMM techniques;
• know what CMM techniques are available in various application areas and what are the theoretical basis of each methods;
• analyze, interpret, compare the results of computational techniques for real applications;
• understand the limits of applicability and the degree of reliability of the main classes of CMM techniques and be able to plan a virtual experiment in an optimal way and evaluate the reliability of the achieved results.

Finally, the school will provide students and researchers in the early stages with an important opportunity to interact with high-profile national and international scientists, and establish a network of contacts for eventual future collaborations.

The official language of the school is English.

The course is scheduled to begin on the morning of Monday July 27th; Mon-Fri will be full course days; the course will finish on Friday 31 in the afternoon.

The course is organized in a way to alternate lectures (typically in the morning) and parallel practical sessions (typically in the afternoon). The lectures will be public.

The practical sessions will give participants the opportunity to learn practical molecular modeling tools and test them in concrete cases. Access to the practical sessions is reserved to official School participants. 

Students will have ample time to meet and speak with lecturers, especially at the coffee breaks, lunches and the social event.

Aatto Laaksonen, Stockholm University
Dario Estrin, Buenos Aires University
Amit Kumar, Cagliari University
Santiago Di Lella, Buenos Aires University
Francesca Mocci, Cagliari University
Maria Valentini, CRS4
Enrico Pieroni, CRS4
Giancarlo Cappellini, Cagliari University
Roberto Cardia, Cagliari University
Claudio Melis, Cagliari University
Vincenzo Martorana, CNR Palermo
Francesco Sciortino, Rome La Sapienza University
Francesca Spyrakis, Torino University
Leon De Villiers Engelbrecht, Cagliari University

Leif Eriksson, Gothenburg University

Lecture Constanze Kalcher, OVITO GmbH i Gr.