Presenters for 2004:   Stephanie Andrews   Christopher Bailey   Joanna Berzowska   Shushil Bhakar   and Eric Hortop   Cliff Burgess   Paulo Chagas   Dennis Dollens   Dan Falk   Sarah Filley   Ivette Fuentes-Guridi   Lila Kari   Narendra Pachkhede   Chris Salter   Chelsea Smock   Clara Ursitti   Derek van der Kooy   Yon Visell   Fabian Winkler   Panel Discussion Symposium, 2004 How Does Nature Compute? by Lila Kari University of Western Ontario http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~lila Biomolecular (DNA) computing is an emergent field lying at the crossroads of mathematics, computer science and molecular biology. The main idea behind biomolecular computing is that data can be encoded in DNA strands, and molecular biology tools can be used to perform arithmetic and logic operations. The birth of this field was the 1994 breakthrough experiment of Len Adleman who solved a hard computational problem solely by manipulating DNA strands in test-tubes. Research into biomolecular computing could lead to new revolutionary ways of computing by using DNA, RNA or other biomolecules. A complementary approach to understanding bioinformation is through biological computation, which studies the information processing capabilities of cellular organisms. Indeed, cells and nature "compute" all the time by reading and "rewriting" DNA through processes that modify DNA or RNA sequences. Research into the computational abilities of cellular organism has the potential to uncover the laws governing biological information and to enable us to harness the computational power of cells. This talk will address two aspects of the DNA computing research: the computational power of unicellular organisms and the limits of computation by self-assembly (the process by which objects autonomously come together to form complex structures). Biography: Lila Kari is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Biocomputing at the Computer Science Department of The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. She received her M.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1987 from the University of Bucharest, Romania. Her Ph.D. thesis on insertions and deletions in formal languages (University of Turku) was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for the best Ph.D. Dissertation in Finland in 1991. Her current research is in biomolecular computing and theoretical computer science and she has published over a hundred research article in journals and conferences as well as presented numerous invited talks. She is the recipient of the UWO Faculty of Science Award of Excellence for exceptional performance in undergraduate teaching (2000) and the 2002 Florence Bucke Science Prize. Besides mathematics and biology, her other interests include nature, dancing, music, literature, poetry, philosophy, psychology and arts.   Page Top Copyright © 2004 Subtle Technologies Festival