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

Corentin Briat (FHNW)
David Brueckner (University of Basel)
Daniel Maria Busiello (Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems)
Manon Costa (Université de Toulouse)
Paul Francois (Université de Montréal)
Benjamin Friedrich (TU Dresden)
Yusuke Himeoka (The University of Tokyo)
Yuji Hirono (Osaka University)
Sanjay Jain (University of Delhi and Santa Fe Institute)
Keita Kamino (Academia Sinica)
Daisuke Kiga (Waseda University)
David Lacoste (ESPCI)
Shiling Liang (Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems)
Leenoy Meshulam (University of Washington, Seattle)
John Jairo Molina Lopez (Kyoto University)
Rami Pugatch (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Pawel Piotr Romanczuk (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Gašper Tkačik (Institute of Science and Technology Austria)
Matthew Turner (Warwick University)

Schedule

March/3 (Mon): Topic session 1. Introductory lectures

March/4 (Tue): Topic session 2. Biological Information Processing & Control

March/5 (Wed): Topic session 2. Biological Information Processing & Control

March/6 (Thu): Symposium Day 1

March/7 (Fri): Symposium Day 2

March/8 (Sat): Symposium Day 3

March/9 (Sun): Free Discussion & Excursion

March/10 (Mon): Topic session 3. Self-replication & Self-assembly

March/11 (Tue): Topic session 4. Multicellular Dynamics

March/12 (Wed): Topic session 5. Statistical Physics in Biology

March/13 (Thu): Topic session 6. Chemical Reaction Network, Thermodynamics, & Control

March/14 (Fri): Topic session 7. Future direction

March/15 (Sat): Departure

Zoom Link and Recordings

See here (internal link)

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).