Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics

This volume contains a selection of the best contributions delivered at the 5th
InternationalMeeting on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics
and Biostatistics (CIBB 2008) held at IIASS “E. R. Caianiello”, Vietri sul Mare,
Salerno, Italy during October 3–4, 2008.
The CIBB meeting series is organized by the Special Interest Group on
Bioinformatics of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) to provide a
forum open to researchers from different disciplines to present and discuss problems
concerning computational techniques in bioinformatics, systems biology
and medical informatics with a particular focus on neural networks, machine
learning, fuzzy logic, and evolutionary computational methods. Previous CIBB
meetings were held with an increasing number of participants within the format
of a special session of larger conferences, namely, WIRN 2004 in Perugia,
WILF 2005 in Crema, FLINS 2006 in Genoa and WILF 2007 in Camogli. Given
the great success of the special session at WILF 2007 that included 26 papers
after a strong selection, the 2008 edition of CIBB was organized, at last, as an
autonomous conference, governed by its own Steering Committee.
CIBB 2008 attracted 69 paper submissions from all over the world. A rigorous
peer-review selection process was applied to ultimately select the papers
included in the program of the conference. This volume collects the best contributions
presented at the conference. Moreover, the volume also includes three
presentations from keynote speakers.
The success of this conference is to be credited to the contribution of many
people. In the first place, we would like to thank the organizers of the special
sessions for their strong effort in attracting so many good papers that extend
and deepen the main topics of CIBB. Moreover, special thanks are due to the
Program Committee members and reviewers for their commitment to the task
of providing high-quality reviews. Last, but not least, we would like to thank
the keynote speakers Mario Lauria (Systems Biology Lab, TIGEM, Telethon
Institute of Genetics and Medicine, Naples, Italy), Nicolas Le Novere (Computational
Neurobiology, EMBL-EBI, Wellcome-Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton,
UK), and Giorgio Valentini (DSI, Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Informazione,
Universit`a degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy).
While we are concluding this editorial effort, a special thought goes to Tonina
Starita who pioneered the applications of computational intelligence to the
biomedical field and left us on August 2008. Our tender thanks go to her.