BICOB 2020: Editor's Preface

It is our pleasure to welcome the participants, authors, presenters, attendees, and organizers of the 12th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICOB 2020), which is sponsored by the International Society for Computers and Their Applications (ISCA).

Now in its 12^th year, BICOB has established itself as one of the leading international conferences in the research areas of bioinformatics and computational biology. The conference offers researchers and scientists unique opportunities to present and discuss their research results, techniques and findings with other researchers having similar interests. This year, the BICOB conference is held in San Francisco, California, USA, March 23 – 25, 2020.  

BICOB 2020 provides excellent scientific quality and broad impact, with two keynote talks by well-known scientists and contributed talks at a highly competitive acceptance rate. A broad range of topics in bioinformatics and computational biology are addressed in the conference such as bioinformatics algorithms, genomics, machine learning applications in bioinformatics, and medical informatics. The conference is gathering researchers, scientists, practitioners, and attendants from multiple countries, including China, France, India, Japan, Mexico, UK, and USA. The participants are from various research institutions including universities, corporations, and government research agencies.

Each paper submitted to BICOB 2020 was peer-reviewed and evaluated by three reviewers who are members of the international program committee. Papers have been evaluated based on the originality, significance, technical contents, application contents, and presentation style. BICOB 2020 includes a best paper award that will be presented during the conference awards ceremony. Moreover, BICOB 2020 will include a journal special issue dedicated to extended versions of selected outstanding conference papers. The online conference management system EasyChair was used to automate the workflow for submission, refereeing, and proceedings generation. All BICOB-2020 papers are available online full text freely through the EasyChair EPiC Series, which allows the papers to be freely retrievable via Google and Google Scholar (and also indexed in Scopus). 

Finally, we would like to gratefully acknowledge the professional work of the international program committee and the sub-reviewers for their great contributions. We would like to thank the ISCA president, board of directors, and the ISCA executive director for their support. We also want to thank all the presenters and attendees for actively contributing to the success of BICOB 2020. We look forward to great presentations and discussions at the conference. All participants are invited to make new friends within the BICOB family. We sincerely wish every participant to enjoy the conference.