IEEE e-Science Conference Steering Committee announced in Stockholm, Swden on December 7 that the 9th IEEE International Conference on e-Science will be held in Beijing in 2013, this is the first time for the conference to be held in China.

The IEEE e-Science conference is designed to bring together leading international and interdisciplinary research communities, developers, and users of e-Science applications and enabling IT technologies. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest research and product/tool developments and to highlight related activities from around the world.

IEEE e-Science conference was held every year. This is the 7th IEEE e-Science conference. The conference was structured around the following e-Science themes: Arts, Humanities and e-Social Science, Bioinformatics and Health, Physical Sciences and Engineering, Climate & Earth Sciences, Data Management and Digital Repositories, Research Tools, Workflow and Systems, Novel Infrastructure, Education and e-Science Practice. Specially, this year's Physics Nobel Laureate Brian P. Schmidt made a keynote speech on Astro-informatics during the conference.

The e-Science initiative of China started in early 2000s. Since then, great progress has been achieved in cyberinfrastructure and e-Science applications. To connect the China e-Science community, even the Asia e-Science community, with the global e-Science community, the Informatization Leading Group Office of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and National Science & Technology Infrastructure Center of Ministry of Science and Technology of China submitted a proposal jointly for hosting the 9th IEEE e-Science conference in 2013, with Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of CAS as the local organizer and Microsoft Research as the supporter from industry.

Six paper presentations were made by the bidding team members respectively on Collaboration Environment for Metagenomics Research, Data Mining in Research of Avian Influenza Virus Cross-Species Infection, Chinese e-VLBI Network, e-Science Practice for Wild Birds' Monitoring and Protection in Qinghai Lake Region, Cloud-based Life Science Gateway, and Cyberinfrastructure and e-Science Application Practices in Chinese Academy of Sciences.