Community: Positions available: Microsoft Research - University of Trento Centre
Posted on Saturday, April 23 @ 05:02:00 CDT by poster |
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The new interdisciplinary centre of excellence
Microsoft Research - University of Trento Centre for Computational and
Systems Biology has been established in the Trento region (Italy). The main objectives and activities of the centre are
Overall objectives
1. To advance the state of knowledge of biological information processing,
the aetiology of disease, and potentially new therapies through the creation of
a new research centre that will bring together scientists from multiple
disciplines to focus on conducting leading research into advanced computational modeling of biological systems.
2. To conduct novel research into defining new computational and communication paradigms that are 'biomimetic' in nature, i.e., based on new principles learned from the research into biological information processing.
3. To exploit the research. This is expected to take the form of the development of new computational tools for enabling the predictive modeling of biological systems and processes for basic and applied research. These tools will help improving health-care, environment monitoring and protection, quality of food as well as developing better therapies and treatments by the pharmaceutical industries.
4. To disseminate and communicate the results of this research for the
benefit of the scientific community globally, including publications, open
conferences and workshops, and provide freely available, the tools developed in the
course of the research for (non-commercial) science.
Activities:
Calculi for Biology, and 'Biomimetic' computation
We attack an open and challenging problem: the definition of a set of basic
and general primitives for modeling biological systems directly inspired by
biological processes. Hence, the main objective of this theme is to define a
calculus for biology and develop a prototype to be applied in the theme of
case studies. We also plan to include quantitative information in the definition
of the calculus.
It is our belief that biological phenomena can serve as valuable source of
inspiration for new primitives of process calculi and new computational paradigms. Process calculi, by their own nature, take input and output, and hence communication, as the very basic form of action/reaction between concurrent systems.
Concurrency theory-and particularly process algebras-are emerging as a highly
promising tool to provide formal foundations to systems biology. This field
is evolving rapidly
Case studies
The main goal of this theme is to validate and tune the work of the previous
theme by exploiting the results in software developing tools and helping biologists to do science. Furthermore, the preliminary analysis of real problems will inform the design of suitable primitives. Also, we will build upon the effort of the theme on calculi for the definition of analysis,
verification and simulation techniques to acquire new knowledge on the biological realm. A different case study could inform how the languages and techniques devised here could be transposed into the ICT field to improve software quality and to manage complexity.
Storing dynamical evolution of biological systems
The main goal of this theme is to set-up the mining and access to distributed
databases storing information (programs) on the dynamic behaviour of
biological systems. Coordination with servers providing the run-time support for
non-homogeneous data should also be provided. The knowledge and technology
acquired in the first two research themes will be used to populate databases.
Detailed information on recruitment can be found at the page
http://www.unitn.it/events/microsoft/index_eng.htm
following the link recruitment. The selection procedure will take place in
the period 'end of May - mid June'.
More information on the centre will be available within few days on the web
site.
Best regards,
Corrado Priami
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Prof. Corrado Priami Tel. 0461 882085
Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni
Universita' di Trento Fax 0461 88 2093
Via Sommarive, 14 http://www.dit.unitn.it/~bioinfo
38050 Povo (TN) - Italia priami@dit.unitn.it
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