This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, PRIB 2013, held in Nice, France, in June 2013. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on bio-molecular networks and pathway analysis; learning, classification, and clustering; data mining and knowledge discovery; protein: structure, function, and interaction; motifs, sites, and sequence analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, PRIB 2014, held in Stockholm, Sweden in August 2014. The 9 revised full papers and 9 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The focus of the conference was on the latest Research in Pattern Recognition and Computational Intelligence-Based Techniques Applied to Problems in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

In the post-genomic era, a holistic understanding of biological systems and p- cesses,inalltheircomplexity,is criticalincomprehendingnature'schoreography of life. As a result, bioinformatics involving its two main disciplines, namely, the life sciences and the computational sciences, is fast becoming a very promising multidisciplinary research ?eld. With the ever-increasing application of lar- scalehigh-throughputtechnologies,suchasgeneorproteinmicroarraysandmass spectrometry methods, the enormous body of information is growing rapidly. Bioinformaticians are posed with a large number of di?cult problems to solve, arising not only due to the complexities in acquiring the molecular infor- tion but also due to the size and nature of the generated data sets and/or the limitations of the algorithms required for analyzing these data. Although the ?eld of bioinformatics is still in its embryonic stage, the recent advancements in computational and information-theoretic techniques are enabling us to c- ductvariousinsilicotestingandscreeningofmanylab-basedexperimentsbefore these are actually performed in vitro or in vivo. These in silico investigations are providing new insights for interpretation and establishing a new direction for a deeper understanding. Among the various advanced computational methods currently being applied to such studies, the pattern recognition techniques are mostly found to be at the core of the whole discovery process for apprehending the underlying biological knowledge. Thus, we can safely surmise that the - going bioinformatics revolution may, in future, inevitably play a major role in many aspects of medical practice and/or the discipline of life sciences.

Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways, and at many levels, from the globalInternetdowntomicroandnanodevices. Manyofthesedevicesarehighly mobile and autonomous and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way. A fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized c- puting systemsthat arecapableofoperating in changing environmentsandwith noisy input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under c- straints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power. These systems should be able to adapt and learn how to react to unforeseen scenarios as well as to display properties comparable to social entities. The observation of nature has brought us many great and unforeseen concepts. Biological systems are able to handle many of these challenges with an elegance and e?ciency far beyond currenthumanartifacts. Basedonthisobservation, bio-inspiredapproacheshave been proposed as a means of handling the complexity of such systems. The goal is to obtain methods to engineer technical systems, which are of a stability and e?ciency comparable to those found in biological entities. This Special Issue on Biological and Biologically-inspired Communication contains the best papers from the Second International Conference on Bio- Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONET- ICS 2007). The BIONETICS conference aims to bring together researchers and scientistsfromseveraldisciplines incomputerscienceandengineeringwhereb- inspired methods are investigated, as well as from bioinformatics, to deepen the information exchange and collaboration among the di?erent communities