BCXT seminar: INFORMATION DYNAMICS AND BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
From BioMASS Laboratory Wiki
The following BCXT seminar will be held at noon on April 16 in IGB 3140.
INFORMATION DYNAMICS AND BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
Les Gasser and Dan Wright
Biological systems large and small have developed capacities to capture, represent, and use information. This feat has been accomplished not just once but repeatedly and in many different contexts: heritability, multi-cellular coordination, immune systems, neural systems, animal signaling, and language are all examples. Is there a pattern here? We think so. Viewed as evolutionary information systems, these biological facilities may exhibit specific classes of information structure and dynamics. In this talk we'll present a general model of information dynamics derived from an analysis of evolutionary aspects of language. Then we'll discuss how to apply variants of this model to several instances of information dynamics in other biological settings. Our aims are to understand:
- How (specific) biological information systems may have emerged,
- How information dynamics constrains biological structures and uses of information
- How information dynamics may inform other significant biological issues such as morphology, development, adaptability, bio-complexity, etc.
BIOS:
- Les Gasser is a Professor of Library/Information Science and Computer Science at UIUC, where he arrived in 1998 following 16 years at USC (Computer Science) and 3 years at the US National Science Foundation (CISE). He was one of the founders of the field of Distributed AI/Multi-Agent Systems (http://ifaamas.org). He's currently working on problems at the intersection of information & network dynamics, language evolution, and systems biology. (See http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~gasser ; http://langev.org)
- Dan Wright is a Ph.D. student in Library/Information Science, working on the origins of information and heritability.
