On the Roles of Computer Science in Systems Biology

Oded Maler, CNRS-VERIMAG, Grenoble, France.

Abstract:

In this talk I argue that informatics (computer science) is not only a functional *tool* in the service of Biology, but that it should be a fundamental part of the mathematics and physics of Biology. In particular, certain threads of CS research (which I, incidently, happen to work on) can facilitate the proliferation of more unified dynamical systems models into Biology. To show what I mean I first give a crash course in verification and then illustrate with 3 examples: adding timing information to genetic regulatory networks, reducing the number of false positives in discrete abstractions of continuous dynamical systems and computing tubes of trajectories for some nonlinear systems.

Bio:

Oded Maler obtained his B.A. in Computer Science from the Technion, Haifa in 1979 and his M.Sc. in Management Science from the University of Tel-Aviv at In 1984. In 1989 he finished his Ph.D. thesis (Finite Automata: Infinite Behavior, Learnability and Decomposition), under the liberal supervision of A. Pnueli in the department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot. After two years of post-doc at IRISA, Rennes, he moved to Grenoble at 1992 and obtained a research position (CR1) at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) in 1994. He has been promoted to "research director" (DR2) in 2001. And he lives more or less happily ever after.