Computational and Physical Understanding of Biological Information Processing (TP24BI)

We are excited to announce the TSVP Thematic Program "Computational and Physical Understanding of Biological Information Processing". The program will run from March 3- 15, 2025. All activities will take place at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST).

A symposium connected to the program will be held from March 5-9, 2025.

Title: Computational and Physical Understanding of Biological Information Processing

Theme of the program: The notion of information and its processing are essential concepts for understanding biological systems that behave adaptively in an unpredictably changing world with different time scales. Especially in the field of neuroscience, the concepts of information processing and computation have been adopted and employed since the last century. When we look beyond neuroscience, there are many other phenomena in living systems in which information processing and computational aspects are highly important. Sensing and searching behaviors of biological agents can be observed from single-cell bacteria to multicellular organisms such as mammals. Immune systems can be viewed as learning systems that learn from past infections and adapt to complex and changing pathogen patterns. Populations of cells in an organism also have information-processing aspects since individual cells have to act on locally available information and coordinate their collective behavior to achieve various tasks (development, innate immunity, wound healing, and so on). Even evolutionary processes can be regarded as information processing at the population level in the sense that they produce more adapted populations through natural selection by past environmental states.

The objective of this program is to establish a new research field of biological information processing that enables us to integratively and coherently understand a wide range of intelligence functions in various biological phenomena.

Program coordinators

Tetsuya J. Kobayashi (The University of Tokyo)
Simon K. Schnyder (The University of Tokyo)
Naoki Honda (Hiroshima University)

Confirmed speakers (tentative)

Antonio Celani (ICTP)
Manon Costa (Université de Toulouse)
Paul François (Université de Montréal)
Benjamin Friedrich (TU Dresden)
Sanjay Jain (University of Delhi and Santa Fe Institute)
Keita Kamino (Academia Sinica)
Leenoy Meshulam (University of Washington)
John J. Molina (Kyoto University)
Pawel Romanczuk (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Rami Pugatch (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Reiko Tanaka (Imperial College London)
Gasper Tkacik (Institute of Science and Technology Austria)
Matthew Turner (Warwick University)

...more to be confirmed

Schedule (tentative)

Week 1: March 3 - 9 (includes symposium from March 5-9)
Week 2: March 10 - 15

This program is also supported by Information Physics of Living Matters (JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas) and by the JST CREST program (Mathematical Information Platform).