Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics

The ?eld of bioinformatics has two main objectives: the creation and main- nance of biological databases, and the discovery of knowledge from life sciences datainordertounravelthemysteriesofbiologicalfunction,leadingtonewdrugs andtherapiesforhumandisease. Life sciencesdatacomeinthe formofbiological sequences, structures, pathways, or literature. One major aspect of discovering biological knowledge is to search, predict, or model speci?c information in a given dataset in order to generate new interesting knowledge. Computer science methods such as evolutionary computation, machine learning, and data mining all have a great deal to o?er the ?eld of bioinformatics. The goal of the 8th - ropean Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning, and Data Mining in Bioinformatics (EvoBIO 2010) was to bring together experts in these ?elds in order to discuss new and novel methods for tackling complex biological problems. The 8th EvoBIO conference was held in Istanbul, Turkey during April 7-9, 2010attheIstanbulTechnicalUniversity.EvoBIO2010washeldjointlywiththe 13th European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2010), the 10th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Opti- sation (EvoCOP 2010), and the conference on the applications of evolutionary computation,EvoApplications. Collectively,the conferences areorganizedunder the name Evo* (www. evostar. org). EvoBIO, held annually as a workshop since 2003, became a conference in 2007 and it is now the premiere European event for those interested in the interface between evolutionary computation, machine learning, data mining, bioinformatics, and computational biology.