The success of Bioinformatics in recent years has been prompted by research in Molecular Biology and Molecular Medicine in several initiatives. These initiatives gave rise to an exponential increase in the volume and diversification of data, including nucleotide and protein sequences and annotations, high-throughput experimental data, biomedical literature, among many others.

Systems Biology is a related research area that has been replacing the reductionist view that dominated Biology research in the last decades, requiring the coordinated efforts of biological researchers with those related to data analysis, mathematical modeling, computer simulation and optimization.

The accumulation and exploitation of large-scale databases prompts for new computational technology and for research into these issues. In this context, many widely successful computational models and tools used by biologists in these initiatives, such as clustering and classification methods for gene expression data, are based on Computer Science/ Artificial Intelligence (CS/AI) techniques. In fact, these methods have been helping in tasks related to knowledge discovery, modeling and optimization tasks, aiming at the development of computational models so that the response of biological complex systems to any perturbation can be predicted.

The 8th International Conference on Practical Applications of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics (PACBB) aims to promote the interaction among the scientific community to discuss applications of CS/AI with an interdisciplinary character, exploring the interactions between sub-areas of CS/AI, Bioinformatics, Chemoinformatics and Systems Biology.
Brand new ideas in these fields are sought, as well as substantial and relevant revisions and actualizations of previously presented work, project summaries and PhD thesis presented or not.


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
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Everyone interested in participating and presenting his/her work in this workshop may do it by sending a contribution. The papers should be written in English, with a maximum length of 8 pages. They must consist of original, relevant and previously unpublished sound research results related to any of the topics of the conference.

Accepted papers will be included in the proceedings published by Springer Verlag. At least one of the authors will be required to register and attend the symposium to present the paper in order to include the paper in the conference proceedings.

In order to submit a paper you must register as an author at PACBB 2014 conference management system. All papers for PACBB 2014 must be submitted in electronic form (PDF format).

A special issue of an indexed Journal will be published containing peer-reviewed extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the PACBB 2014 Conference.

Additionally, a careful selection of best papers (3-6 manuscripts) will be invited to extend their work for fast track in CMPB journal (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-methods-and-programs-in-biomedicine/)


TOPICS
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Computational areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
· Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining techniques
· Text Mining and Language Processing
· Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition
· Rough, Fuzzy and Hybrid Techniques
· Hidden Markov Models
· Bayesian Approaches
· Artificial Neural Networks
· Support Vector Machines
· Evolutionary Computing
· Case-Based Reasoning systems
· Non-linear dynamical analysis methods and Intelligent signal processing
· Feature selection

Biological areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
· Sequence analysis
· Next generation sequencing
· Comparison and alignment methods
· Motif, gene and signal recognition
· Molecular evolution
· DNA twisting and folding
· High-throughput data analysis (transcriptomics, proteomics, etc)
· Phylogenetics and phylogenomics
· Determination or prediction of the structure of RNA and proteins
· Gene expression data analysis
· Identification of metabolic pathways
· Functional genomics
· Biomarker identification
· Molecular docking and drug design
· Computational problems in genetics such as linkage and QTL analysis, linkage disequilibrium analysis in populations, haplotype determination, SNPs
· Molecular and cellular interactions
· Emergence of properties in complex biological systems
· Visualization of biological systems and networks
· Data and software integration
· Biomedical ontologies
· In silico optimization of biological systems
· Metabolic engineering applications
· Cell simulation and modeling
· Metabolic, regulatory and signaling models/ networks: properties, dynamics, inference/ reconstruction
· Metabolomics/ metabolic fingerprints
· Health-care applications
· Bio imaging


GENERAL CO-CHAIRS
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Scientific Committee
Miguel Rocha – University of Minho (Portugal)
Julio Saez-Rodriguez (Co-Chairman) - European Bioinformatics Institute

Organization Committee
Florentino Fdez-Riverola – University of Vigo (Spain)
Juan F. De Paz (Co-Chairman) - University of Salamanca (Spain)

E-mail and Web Site
Email: pacbb@usal.es
Web Site: http://www.pacbb.net