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 data in order to unravel the mysteries of biological function, leading to new drugs and therapies for human disease. Life sciences data come in the form of biological sequences, structures, pathways, or literature. One major aspect of discovering biological knowledge is to search, predict, or model speci?c infor- tioninagivendatasetinordertogeneratenewinterestingknowledge.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 6th EuropeanConference on EvolutionaryComputation, Machine Learning, andDataMininginBioinformatics(EvoBIO2008)wastobringtogetherexperts from these ?elds in order to discuss new and novelmethods for tackling complex biological problems. The 6th EvoBIO conference was held in Naples, Italy on March 26-28, 2008 at the ¿Centro Congressi di Ateneo Federico II¿. EvoBIO 2008 was held jointly with the 11th European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2008), the 8th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation (EvoCOP 2008), and the Evo Workshops. Collectively, the conf- ences and workshops were organized under the name Evo* (www.evostar.org).