A recent google search for "definition of bioinformatics" returned over 352,000 results. NIH defines bioinformatics as: research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data. Webopedia's definition is: the application of computer technology to the management of biological information. Specifically, it is the science of developing computer databases and algorithms to facilitate and expedite biological research. Luscombe et al. proposed this definition to the Oxford English Dictionary: bioinformatics is conceptualising biology in terms of molecules (in the sense of physical chemistry) and applying "informatics techniques"(derived from disciplines such as applied maths, computer science and statistics) to understand and organise the information associated with these molecules, on a large scale ...

Brief Biography

Li Zhang received his BS and MS degrees in computer science in 1991 and 1998, MA in mathematics in 1997, and Ph. D. in computer science in 2004. Currently he is an assistant professor of the department of computer science, Eastern Michigan University. During his Ph. D. study in the department of computer science and engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, he was working under Dr. Aidong Zhang's supervision in bioinformaics research group. His main research interests include bioinformatics, data mining, visualization, computer graphics, knowledge representation, computational linguistic, etc.