The growth in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology fields over
the last few years has been remarkable and the trend is to increase its
pace. In fact, the need for computational techniques that can
efficiently handle the huge amounts of data produced by the new
experimental techniques in Biology is still increasing driven by new
advances in Next Generation Sequencing, several types of the so called
omics data and image acquisition, just to name a few. The analysis of
the datasets that produces and its integration call for new algorithms
and approaches from fields such as Databases, Statistics, Data Mining,
Machine Learning, Optimization, Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence. Within this scenario of increasing data availability,
Systems Biology has also been emerging as an alternative to the
reductionist view that dominated biological research in the last
decades. Indeed, Biology is more and more a science of information
requiring tools from the computational sciences. In the last few years,
we have seen the surge of a new generation of interdisciplinary
scientists that have a strong background in the biological and
computational sciences. In this context, the interaction of researchers
from different scientific fields is, more than ever, of foremost
importance boosting the research efforts in the field and contributing
to the education of a new generation of Bioinformatics scientists.
PACBB'12 hopes to contribute to this effort promoting this fruitful
interaction. PACBB'12 technical program included 32 papers from a
submission pool of 61 papers spanning many different sub-fields in
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Therefore, the conference will
certainly have promoted the interaction of scientists from diverse
research groups and with a distinct background (computer scientists,
mathematicians, biologists). The scientific content will certainly be
challenging and will promote the improvement of the work that is being
developed by each of the participants.