Motivation and Objectives

Bioinformatics is a prominent interdisciplinary research area that began with the advances in Molecular Biology, in particular related to the sequencing of several genomes, including the Human Genome Project. Beyond its critical role in the field of Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics nowadays is also an essential component in biomedical and clinical research, particularly in the development of early diagnosis techniques, in the study of complex diseases, in the analysis of the efficacy of drugs or in the strain improvement of economic interest.

The increasing amount and diversification of data being generated by several high-throughput experimental techniques, together with the growing complexity of the problems arising in its analysis, has called for novel and scalable methods to tackle the deluge of biomedical information. The development of these methods poses important challenges in fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Computer Science, Signal and Image Processing, Statistics, Optimization, Privacy and Security, among several others that are within the confluence of Informatics.

Topics of interest

The session welcomes submissions of papers in sub-fields of Bioinformatics related (but not restricted) to the following topics:
Biomedical applications
Data and network visualization
Databases, warehousing and management
Data integration, metadata and ontologies
Data anonymization, privacy and security
Data Mining techniques
Evolutionary computing
High-throughput data analysis: proteomics, transcriptomics or other omics data
Metabolic Engineering
Model inference of regulatory/metabolic networks
Molecular evolution and phylogenetic analysis
Population genetics
Protein structure, molecular docking and drug design
Qualitative/Quantitative modeling and simulation
RNA structure prediction
Sequence analysis, comparison and alignment methods
SNPs, mutations and haplotyping
Translational medicine
Text mining and language processing
Web services and workflow systems


Program Committee

Francisco Couto FCUL/UL (coordinator)
Alexandre Francisco INESC-ID/IST
Alysson Bessani FCUL/UL
Ana Teresa Freitas INESC-ID/IST
André Falcão FCUL/UL
Arlindo Oliveira INESC-ID/IST
Armando Pinho DETI/UA
Cátia Pesquita FCUL/UL
Claudine Chaouiya IGC
Francisco Couto FCUL/UL
José Luís Oliveira DETI/UA
Luí­s Russo INESC-ID/IST
Mário Silva INESC-ID/IST
Miguel Rocha CCTC/UM
Pedro Tiago Monteiro INESC-ID
Rui Camacho FEUP/UP
Rui Mendes CCTC/UM
Sara Madeira INESC-ID/IST
Ví­tor Costa FCUP/UP