The 8th International Conference on Systems Biology and the 4th Translational Bioinformatics Conference (ISB/TBC 2014), organized by Chinese Academy of Sciences and Qingdao University will be held in Qingdao, China, October 25-27, 2014. The conference is sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Academy of Mathematics and Systems Sciences of CAS (AMSS), Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of CAS (SIBS), Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology of CAS (QIBEBT), Qingdao University, Computational Systems Biology Society of ORSC, Systems Biology Technical Committee of IEEE SMC Society, Korean Society for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (KSBSB), The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI), Korean Genome Organization (KOGO). Systems Biology and Bioinformatics have become intensive research topics in the recent past decade and attracted great many leading scientists working in Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science. Optimization, Statistics, and many other mathematical methods have been widely used in the field. Following the successful ISB conferences series from 2007, the purpose of ISB/TBC 2014 is to extend the international forum for scientists, researchers, educators, and practitioners to exchange ideas and approaches, to present research findings and state-of-the-art solutions in this interdisciplinary field, including mathematical methods and its applications in biosciences and researches on various aspects of Systems Biology, such as integration of genome-wide microarray, proteomic, and metabolomic data, inference and comparison of biological networks, and model testing through design of experiments.