نبذه عن الكتاب: It is widely recognized that the field of biology is in the midst of a ‘data explosion’. A series of technical advances in recent years has increased the amount of data that biologists can record about different aspects of an organism at the genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic levels. This data is, of course, vital to advancing our knowledge. In recent years, the discipline of bioinformatics has allowed biologists to make full use of the advances in computer science and computational statistics in analysing this data. However, as the volume of data grows, the techniques used must become more sophisticated to cater for large-scale data and noise. Also, given the growth in biological data, there is a need to extract information that was not previously known from these databases to supplement current knowledge. Large databases may contain interesting patterns that, if identified and authenticated by further laboratory and clinical work, can lead to novel theories about the causes of various diseases and also possibly to new drugs for their treatment. The discipline of bioinformatics has reached the end of its first phase, and the motivation behind this book is to characterize the principles that may underlie second phase bioinformatics. That is, second phase bioinformatics is when the discipline, instead of being informed by just computer science and computational statistics, is also informed by artificial intelligence techniques.