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The Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
The Weizmann Institute of Science
announces the
Amir Pnueli Memorial Lecture
to be delivered by
Professor Grzegorz Rozenberg
Leiden University
University of Colorado at Boulder
Sponsored by the Arthur and Rochelle
Belfer Institute of Mathematics and Computer
Science
at The Weizmann Institute of Science
The title:
A Formal Framework
for Processes Inspired by Biochemistry
on Wednesday, 24 November 2010, at 11:00
in the Dolfi and Lola Ebner Auditorium, on campus
A reception in honor of Prof. Rozenberg will be held after the lecture
Abstract
Natural Computing is an interdisciplinary field of research that
investigates human-designed computing inspired by nature as well as
computation taking place in nature, i.e., it investigates models,
computational techniques, and computational technologies inspired by
nature as well as it investigates phenomena/processes taking place in
nature in terms of information processing.
One of the research areas from the second strand of research is the
computational nature of biochemical reactions. It is hoped that this line
of research may contribute to a computational understanding of the
functioning of the living cell, which is based on interactions between (a
huge number of) individual reactions. These reactions are regulated, and
the main regulation mechanisms are facilitation/acceleration and
inhibition/retardation. The interactions between individual reactions take
place through their influence on each other, and this influence happens
through these two mechanisms.
In our lecture we present a formal framework for the investigation of
processes
carried by biochemical reactions. We motivate this framework by explicitely
stating a number of assumptions that hold for a great number of biochemical
reactions, and we point out that these assumptions are very different from
the ones underlying traditional models of computation. We discuss some basic
properties of
processes carried by biochemical reactions, and demonstrate how to capture
and analyse, in our formal framework, some biochemistry related notions.
The lecture is of a tutorial style and self-contained, in particular no
knowledge of biochemistry is required.
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