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 February 24 - March 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)

Schedule (tentative)

Week 1: February 24 -
Week 2: March 3 - (includes symposium from March 5-9)
Week 3: March 10 -