Systems Biology is a new area of science that studies living systems comprised of many interacting parts. These could be molecules within a cell, cells within an organism, or individual organisms within an ecosystem. It differs from classical biology, which has largely focused on understanding the behavior of the fundamental units of living systems, whereas systems biology is concerned with properties of the entire system. It is necessarily an interdisciplinary subject, using approaches from biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics.
Computer science is central to systems biology. Because biological systems are so complex, traditional methods of analysis and modeling are inadequate or too inefficient to be practical. There are striking similarities between some of the major problems of software analysis and systems biology. Researchers in both areas must deal with systems that cannot be understood by intuitive, informal methods. This has led to the development of software aids for describing and testing systems. The experience gained by computer scientists working on software analysis could be very useful when applied to systems biology.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT The Workshop on Logic and Systems Biology is affiliated with the 2014 Logic in Computer Science (LICS) Conference in Vienna, Austria and is scheduled for July 13. It will consist of one day of invited lectures and a session for discussion of open problems and future research. The talks will cover a variety of connections between computer science and biology, with emphasis on the uses of formal logic in modeling biomolecular interaction systems.
Systems biology presents challenges and opportunities for computer science. Although the number of computer scientists who work on systems biology is growing, they still represent a small fraction of the population. The lectures are intended to be accessible to computer scientists who have some knowledge about the use of formal methods for analyzing software and hardware, but who may not have much experience with biology. The speakers will also be invited to submit more technical versions of their talks to a refereed proceedings.
BROADER IMPACT The lectures will explore connections between biology, computer science, and mathematics, with the goal of encouraging collaborations between researchers in the different groups, leading to new applications of logic and raising interesting theoretical questions. Students and postdoctoral fellows will be especially encouraged to participate in the workshop. Since the talks will be partly expository, this will be an opportunity for them to broaden their perspective, with future benefits to their research and teaching.
