and niche technology; intelligent computing and knowledge discovery and data mining; soft computing and machine learning; computational biology, protein structure and function prediction; genetic algorithms; artificial bee colony algorithms; swarm intelligence and optimization; social computing; information security; virtual reality and human-computer interaction; healthcare informatics theory and methods; unsupervised learning; collective intelligence; intelligent computing in robotics; intelligent computing in communication networks; intelligent control and automation; intelligent data analysis and prediction; gene expression array analysis; gene regulation modeling and analysis; protein-protein interaction prediction; biology inspired computing and optimization; analysis and visualization of large biological data sets; motif detection; biomarker discovery; modeling; simulation; and optimization of biological systems; biomedical data modeling and mining; intelligent computing in biomedical signal/image analysis; intelligent computing in brain imaging; neuroinformatics; cheminformatics; intelligent computing in computational biology; computational genomics; special session on biomedical data integration and mining in the era of big data; special session on big data analytics; special session on artificial intelligence for ambient assisted living; and special session on swarm intelligence with discrete dynamics.