Preface

These are the proceedings of the eighth Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), held on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. The proceedings for this and previous PSB meetings are also available in electronic form at http://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/ and are indexed in the Medline resource provided by the National Library of Medicine of the U.S. The online proceedings offer more than 350 manuscripts presented since 1996 at PSB. Because PSB sessions are organized in a grass roots fashion, the intellectual challenges of our field can be chronicled by an analysis of the sessions presented each year. Early conferences were dominated by protein structure, HMMs and sequence analysis. More recently, natural language processing, human genetic variation, and comparative genomics have emerged. It is particularly gratifying to note that the impact of PSB papers has been growing, and our published corpus in certain niches (such as natural language processing for biology and reconstruction of metabolic networks) has become influential in these subdisciplines.