Upcoming Events

Starting 16.30, cfaed researcher Ivo Sbalzarini is going to hold the first talk titled „Scientific Computing in Systems Biology - Unraveling the Algorithms of Life“.
When cells form tissues and embryos develop, they solve hard computational problems. Cells take decisions based on local communication with neighbors and biochemical information processing. A tissue hence constitutes a massively parallel non-deterministic computer. While the source code (=genome) and hardware (=molecules) are increasingly known, the algorithms enacted remain elusive. Sbalzarini and his team develop theories and methods that help reverse-engineer these “algorithms of life”, focusing on methods for numerical simulations of biological processes and of biological image analysis. Comparing simulation results of hypothetical “algorithms of life” with image-analysis results enables us to refine the former until they match. Therefore, they develop numerical simulation methods that are designed to the specific intricacies of biological systems, which he will review in his talk. Moreover, he will show how the unifying framework of Particle Methods allows combined treatment of image-analysis, simulation, and model learning on parallel high-performance computers. Particle Methods are therefore the team’s prime algorithmic research area, including supporting by software systems like the PPM Library and the PPML domain-specific language. Taken together, they hope to catalyze the next big step for System Biology: uncovering the compute model evolved by nature that enables cells to effortlessly solve NP-hard problems beyond the Bremermann limit.