Background

According to Wikipedia [1], big data refers to a collec-tion of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization. It’s well-known that biologists have struggled with ‘big data ’ for a long time. And the situation gets more and more severe. Recently, it is rea-lized that computing power, which doubles roughly every 2 years by Moore’s Law, was not sufficient to keep up with the accumulation of sequencing data. While massive amounts of new sequencing data are being generated worldwide, computing systems biology [2], driven by the complex biological data, should be advancing rapidly enough to digest it. Actually, this energetic interdisciplinary field has kept making signifi-cant progresses to mine the biological data to address fundamental questions in biology. Further it is expected to lead to practical applications in medicine, drug dis-covery, and bio-engineering. Along with the research development, the societies of computational systems biology are booming too. Our IEEE International Conference on Computational Sys-tems Biology (IEEE ISB), launched six years ago, con-tinues to serve as a high-quality platform and brought many researchers and students to freely exchange ideas [3][4][5]. The 6th IEEE International Conference on Computational Systems Biology (IEEE ISB2012) wa