Preface: Message from the Paper Chairs

These are the proceedings of the Third IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization (BioVis 2013), which was held on October 13-14, 2013 in conjunction with IEEE VIS in Atlanta, GA, USA. The symposium brings together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and engaging visualization researchers in problems in biological data visualization; as well as involving bioinformaticians and biologists in state-of-the-art visualization research. The symposium also serves as a platform for researchers in biology and bioinformatics to share pressing visualization challenges and potential solutions in their fields; to initiate interdisciplinary collaborations; and to provide an outlet and training ground for junior visualization researchers with a keen interest in biological problems. These proceedings contain fourteen papers selected from thirty-two submissions (43% acceptance rate) describing state-of-the-art tools, techniques, and technologies from the field of biological data visualization. The submitted papers were assigned to Program Committee (PC) members and external reviewers, based on a match between paper topics and keywords and the declared expertise of the reviewers. Each paper was reviewed for novelty and contribution by at least two program committee members, and, on average, by two additional external reviewers. For each paper, experts from both the visualization and biology/bioinformatics communities were consulted during the review process. When all reviews were completed, a discussion phase was initiated wherein reviewers of each paper could anonymously express their opinions with an opportunity to adjust their reviews and/or scores, and make an acceptance recommendation. The Program Chairs then finalized the decisions on which papers to accept, based on the numerical scores, the detailed reviewer comments and recommendations, and the discussion board messages.