Towards Programmable Biology - Call for Participation

20th July, 2015, York, UK

A Satellite Workshop at the European Conference on Artificial Life, 2015

Synthetic Biology’s vision to repurpose living cells as substrates for general computation has manifested itself in genetic circuit designs that attempt to implement Boolean logic gates, digital memory, oscillators, and other circuits from electrical engineering. Yet, the various achievements in the realm of Synthetic Biology remain isolated and generally lack the modularity and scalability of their electronic counterparts.

This ECAL 2015 satellite workshop revisits cornerstone achievements in Synthetic Biology research that address general computability in biological substrates, in order to demarcate key in-vivo and in-silico challenges of this novel research area. Topics will deal with how paradigms borrowed from digital, electronic devices are best implemented in large-scale biological substrates, and whether unconventional computing paradigms, such as those developed in the research field of Artificial Life, might offer more promising routes toward full-fledged biological computation.

 

Invited Speakers:

        * Martyn Amos, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

        * Friedrich Simmel, Technische Universität München, Germany

 

Call for Participation and Abstracts

This workshop welcomes participants and abstracts from any area of Synthetic Biology and related fields, including, but not limited to:

    * the design and engineering of molecular, cellular and population-based computation

    * domain-specific languages for the specification of biological computation

    * theories and applications of biological computation

We accept abstract submissions for oral and poster presentations.

Abstracts up to 2 pages in length following the formatting guidelines of the ECAL conference should be submitted to toprob@newcastle.ac.uk.

For details, click here

 

Important Dates

    * Abstract submission deadline: 17th April 2015

    * Notification of acceptance:     15th May 2015

    * Workshop date :                     20th July 2015

    * Conference dates:                  20th-24th July 2015

 

Organisers

Harold Fellermann, Omer Markovitch, Owen Gilfellon and Curtis Madsen

Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Biosystems research group

School of Computing Science

Newcastle University

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK