Computer Sciences Colloquium: Distributed Information Processing in Biological and Computational Systems

Abstract:

Systems biology attempts to model and understand biological processes by using computational methods to integrate and analyze several different types of data. In this talk I will present our work on some fundamental issues related to the design of systems biology studies and discuss machine learning methods that can aid in modeling dynamic biological processes. I will then try to argue that the ability to better understand how biological systems operate, and what they are attempting to compute, can provide interesting (and sometimes surprising) insights that can help us improve state of the art distributed computing algorithms.  Specifically, I will present examples related to the computation of Maximal Independent Set (MIS) in networks and in flies, networks design algorithms based on neural synapse pruning in developing brains and methods for reasoning under uncertainty  based on bacterial food search.