This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies, held in Shanghai, China, in July 2020. Due to the safety concerns and travel restrictions caused by COVID-19, BICT 2020 took place online in a live stream. BICT 2020 aims to provide a world-leading and multidisciplinary venue for researchers and practitioners in diverse disciplines that seek the understanding of key principles, processes and mechanisms in biological systems and leverage those understandings to develop novel information and communications technologies (ICT). The 20 full and 8 short papers were carefully revied and selected from 56 submissions. In addition to the main track targeting broad and mainstream research topics, BICT 2020 includes four special tracks with focused research topics on internet of everything, intelligent internet of things and network applications, intelligent sensor network, and data-driven intelligent modeling, application and optimization.