Elodie Laine and Alessandra Carbone organize the mini-symposium « Formal methods in the eyes of biological data » the 5th of June in Ronce-les-Bains. The symposium will highlight recent mathematical developments toward elucidating biological questions or modeling complex biological systems. It will illustrate the cross-talk between formal methods and biological data. The symposium is hosted by the SMAI congress (http://smai.emath.fr/smai2017/) and sponsored by the GDR BIM (http://www.gdr-bim.cnrs.fr/).