This special issue in BMC Bioinformatics () Open Access) is aimed at reporting on recent research advances on theories and methods including Human-Computer Interaction & Knowledge Discovery from Data (HCI-KDD), with focus on big and complex data in Bioinformatics. This cross-domain integration and appraisal of different fields shall foster different perspectives and opinions; it will offer a platform for novel ideas and a
fresh look on the methodologies to put such ideas into practice. Some of the questions that we hope to find a solution for includes: (How) can we build systems to facilitate interpretation, insight, sensemaking and understanding of complex data sets from the bioinformatics domain?

We encourage authors to submit original research following the guidelines and requirements of BMC Bioinformatics.
Some hot topics include but are not limited to …

* …Graph-based Knowledge Discovery (e.g. Knowledge Discovery with graph
entropy, biological networks, etc.)
* … Biomarker Discovery
* … Structural Graph Analysis (e.g. in Biology, Systems Biology, Biomedicine, etc.)
* … Methods for Structural Network Analysis (e.g. graph measures and properties
thereof, information-theoretic techniques such as entropy, etc.)
* … Knowledge Discovery from complex networks (e.g. large biomedical data,
protein-protein networks, epigenetics data etc.)
* … Interactive Content Analytics from “unstructured” text data (e.g. computational
topology in text mining, text analytics, NLP, linguistics for bioinformatics, etc.)
* … Big Data Analytics methodologies, methods, approaches and tools (e.g. Hadoop,
R, RStudio, Rapid Miner, KNIME, ELKI, etc. )
* … Multimedia Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery from multimedia data (e.g
from the bioinformatics domain etc.)
* … Swarm Intelligence (collective intelligence) and collaborative
Knowledge Discovery/Data Mining/Decision Making
* … Intelligent, interactive, semi-automatic, multivariate Information Visualization
and Visual Analytics (e.g. in the life sciences etc.)
* … Interactive multimedia Data Exploration and Sensemaking
* … Time-Oriented Data and Information (e.g. longitudinal data, complex noisy time
series, entropy methods, …)
* … Novel Search User Interaction Techniques (supporting human intelligence with
computational intelligence)
* … Future Knowledge Discovery Techniques (Note: science fiction of today is
science fact of tomorrow)
* … Modeling of Human Discovery and exploration Behavior and Understanding
Human Information Needs
* … Innovative Knowledge Discovery methods and methodologies (e.g. Support Vector
Machines, Boltzmann machines, Evolutionary computing, etc. …)
* … Topological Data Analyis (e.g. in complex biological data sets)
* … Special interactive solutions in the biomedical domain (e.g. bioinformatics,
genome analysis, genetics, epigentics, evolution, …)
* … Practical HCI-KDD solutions in the hospital (e.g. content analytics in business
enterprise hospital data, …)