Continuity

In Life, Mind, Sociality

Though the scientific pursuits to understanding what we call cognition versus what we call life can overlap, often for simplicity or pragmatism we try to look at these problems independently of each other. However, by loosening these boundaries up a bit as motivated by the embodiment movement, there seems to be a useful paradigm where life-like things and mind-like things can not just co-exist, but flourish. This perspective is perhaps best illustrated by Hanczyc & Ikegami when demonstrating the capability of simple self-moving oil droplets to act as a model of minimal cognition. Here, the interface/membrane of what constitutes the ‘individual’ is also physically the same interface/membrane that is involved with sensing and reacting to the environment. The oil droplet is defined (by us anyway) by the membrane it maintains in the face of a substance alien and potentially destructive to itself. The maintenance of the character of the droplet is then balanced recursively by its own character and motion, or put more succinctly, a homeodynamic process. In other words, through the example of the simple oil droplet, it can be better imagined how a system that exhibits autopoiesis could arise from humble origins and how proto-cognition and proto-life can co-exist and arise simultaneously.

This entangled continuity between life and mind may also extend naturally to sociality as well. This was demonstrated by Frose, Campos, Virgo in their work exploring the evolution of genetic codes in a population-based iterated learning paradigm. Their work suggests that certain key properties of the genetic code we observe in life today can arise naturally in the context of repeated horizontal interactions between protocells. These population-based iterated learning approaches add further evidence that movement, interaction, adaptive behaviour and now socialization already played a crucial role at the origin and initial evolution of life (Frose, Campos, Virgo). In what may be traditionally considered time-scale separated processes, a continuity is emerging suggesting that we ought to take their interactions more seriously. In some homeodynamic yet open-ended way, individuals work to forge communities while communities work to forge individuals with languages emerging as robust codes to path meaningful homeodynamic interactions. It seems inevitable then that to understand the core elements of life one must also be willing to simultaneously understand things that intuition might suggest are scale separated, like the emergence of individual agents, to cognition, and to socialization. This intuition-jogging observation suggests to us to embrace another form of continuity in our endeavours in Alife, and that is the continuity of art and science, of construction and de-construction, and of Alife and AI, or as Erik Hom suggested in his slides, between Yin and Yang (or Yang and Yin so the analogy keeps the same rhyme).

Adversarial Congruence/Duality

Between ALife/AI

There is a tricky congruence between Alife and AI. As Alife is to open-endedly develop increasingly complex and varied functions, AI is to develop a cognitive system that can develop its own intrinsic motivations from what it has seen and eventually break free into creative intellectual pursuits (Nicholas Guttenberg). In some abstractions, these two endeavors can be held separate and studied as black boxes. However, there is increasing evidence that we might have a lot to gain if we blur the lines between these paradigms. The adversarial congruence between making evermore complicated functions and ever-understanding subjects has lent itself greatly to the pursuit of procedurally generated creativity for example in generative adversarial networks (GANs). This evolutionary arms race of engineering and reverse-engineering, between life and cognition needs to be embraced more emphatically as we move forward. In a more enactive sense, if our creative intellectual pursuits result in transforming the world into one which our cognition fails us, then we will lose our agency in the world and be at the whim of any destructive force. Thus, any complexity that life generates, it must learn to handle. One can abstract out the baseline complexity for different research goals, however the dynamic patterns of these enactive agents can span universally across a variety of scales. It is in these moments where the emergence of the genetic code starts to look like learning, or oil droplets demonstrating proto-cognition.

At the end of ALIFE 2018 a catalogue of the varied forms of complexity, the tools to understand complexity, their relationship to our own lives, and the exploration of hypothetical lives were put out on display. Conversationally, a meta-awareness that this macro-curling of cognition and life unto itself had already deeply penetrated many of the seasoned attendees and organizers, though it seemed many did not have the luxury to pursue the embodied forms of these realizations. Instead, a searching note rang through the conference to guide future thoughts, amidst the busy intermingling of excited ideas being fed to equally excited recipients to digest. Though much revolutionary progress has been made in the last few decades, there is also a palpable thirst for “the juice” as Rodney Brooks puts it. Something new needs to come, perhaps not drastic, perhaps not surprising in hindsight, perhaps a language to socialize across the branches of knowledge and give rise to a common code to allow for the sex of ideas. In any case, ELSI @ ALIFE 2018 punctuated the finale of the main conference highlighting the proto-intermingling between construction and de-construction, Alife and AI, and a forward overview of what the pursuit of the origins of life ought to look like.

As members of the organizing committee of the Winter School, our task was to design a two week course, completely from scratch, that covered the important topics in the entire breadth of the field of Earth-Life Science. How could we make this school different and stand out from the others? What could make this winter school unique?

Active learning in the classroom with old-fashioned clickers

Photo Credit: Nerissa Escanlar

First of all, since the field of Earth-Life science contains so many different research subfields, we wanted to make sure that the Winter School hit on one major point that could differentiate it from the others: interdisciplinarity. ELSI is an inter- and multidisciplinary research institute that focuses on solving important questions in Earth-Life Science. These questions cannot generally be answered with a simple single-discipline approach; rather, an interdisciplinary approach with teams composed of researchers from various backgrounds is required, something that ELSI is uniquely positioned to do given the range of its researcher’s expertise. Because of this, we did not have to go far to find instructors with the breadth of knowledge we wanted for this Winter School. Of course, it’s certainly true that the final contributor/instructor list did contain researchers from various external organizations both domestic and international, a large majority of the instructors were from ELSI. (And again, thanks so much for all of the instructors who took time out of their busy schedules to contribute to the Winter School, especially those who travelled a long way!)

Exoplanetary database project

Photo Credit: Nerissa Escanlar

Additionally, very often in classroom situations what is presented during a seminar or a lecture, although interesting and important, may not be easily directly applied to someone’s research. Thus, ideas presented in the classroom may end up passively ruminating in the corner of one’s brain. Instead, things that are presented in an active way in the classroom, either through participatory learning or through practical demonstrations, are more likely to be incorporated into a student’s active thinking. Because of this, we wanted to incorporate hands-on projects and tutorials (in a wide variety of fields, of course) that the students could personally learn and do in a short period of time. This way, the students will have learned and produced something tangible by the end of the session.

Studying the geology near the Kannawa Fault

Photo Credit: Tomohiro Mochizuki

Finally, us researchers at ELSI are always treated to something that can’t be easily accessed by those at international institutions: Japan. Japan is such a geologically-diverse nation, we knew we wanted to incorporate many different aspects of local geology that students couldn’t get anywhere else. And what better way than to see these things up close? Thus, we designed a short field trip for the students to go and explore some unique local geological features. Our local field experts were able to show the students faults, hot springs, geysers, plate boundaries, volcanoes, and much, much more, while in the classroom we were treated to special seminars by researchers with expertise in local geology, local gaseous volcano disasters, and even with a visit to the Tokyo Tech Archean rock museum!

Taking microbial samples from the hot spring at Mine Onsen

Photo Credit: Kazumi Yoshiya

With these major goals of emphasizing interdisciplinarity, hands-on tutorials, as well as the unique geology of Japan, we hoped that students around the world would be excited by this opportunity to really experience the entire breadth of Earth-Life science. The response was overwhelming. We received 227 applications, far more than we had initially expected,  from all 6 populated continents (but we even had an application from a student who does research in Antarctica!) and also a gender ratio of about 50% women and 50% men! In the end, we chose students who we thought would really embrace the idea of an interdisciplinary school with relevance to applying new ideas to their own research, but also were willing to contribute something from their own research to apply it to other students’ research fields.

Even the instructors were excited to learn about something new!

Photo Credit: Nerissa Escanlar

In the end, the students who did end up coming were a really diverse group from all different research fields (life sciences, Earth sciences, physical sciences, and even science education!) and institutes based in many different countries (Japan, USA, France, Germany, UK, Brazil, South Korea, India, Australia, and Thailand; this doesn’t even count the fact that the students from some of these institutes were themselves already from a different country). They all really embraced the spirit of the Winter School, as they all participated and engaged fully in the field portion, the tutorials and projects, and the wide variety of seminars. It’s such an interesting experience to see a biologist ask really hard questions about how the Earth’s mantle moves, a geologist give it their all to study the metagenome of an underwater hydrothermal system, or a researcher who normally simulates planetary formation go into the lab for the first time and grow bacteria isolated from their own nose!

Many engaging discussions between the instructors and students took place after the seminars

Photo Credit: Nerissa Escanlar

Now as the students return to their home institutions, we hope that what they have gained is a deeper understanding about the importance of interdisciplinarity to answering important questions in modern science, and especially the field of Earth-Life science. The international network of researchers they have cultivated in just two weeks will be a great resource for each of them in the future, not only due to the breadth of research expertise, but also the unique cultural insights that each person was able to contribute and the international friendships each was able to cultivate. Hopefully, they will all have ample opportunities in the future to collaborate with one another and we all can’t wait to see what the future holds for these students.

Photo Credit: Natsumi Noda

Photo Credit: Nerissa Escanlar

We’re all waiting for the next edition of the winter school! Until then!

In the meantime, check out the official #ELSIWS Storify for a tweet-based recap!

The EON meeting in Odawara was attended by 55 international scientists who are part of the collaborative network, including 12 of EON’s international Post-Doctoral Scholars, who all gave presentations of the research they conducted during their tenure. EON Scholars split their time during their 2-year research appointments between ELSI and an external center. External centers include the Carnegie Institution of Washington, NASA Goddard and NASA Ames Space Flight Research Centers (USA), Cambridge University (UK), CalTech (USA), Emory University (USA), the University of Southern California (USA), the University of Vienna (Austria), the University of Southern Denmark, the University of California, San Diego (USA) and the ISIR, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France), the Rutgers University (USA).

Also in attendance were EON’s Global Science Coordinators, who help recruit members and publicize EON as an institution, and include scientists from NASA headquarters, Columbia and Harvard Universities and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Finally, EON advisory board member Marcelo Glaser (Dartmouth University) presented the keynote talk for the meeting.

For more details please visit:

(for English)

http://www.elsi.jp/en/news/event/2018/02/EON_annual_meeting_20180202.html

(for Japanese)

http://www.elsi.jp/ja/news/event/2018/02/EON_annual_meeting_20180202.html

An article regarding this meeting was also published on the website of Tokyo Institute of Technology.

(for English)

https://www.titech.ac.jp/english/news/2018/040605.html

(for Japanese)

https://www.titech.ac.jp/news/2018/040603.html

Venue: ELSI Hall in ELSI-1 building, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

October 5 : registration starts at 8:45am,  session starts at 9:15am

ELSI Conveners: 

Chaitanya Giri – EON Research Fellow

Jim Cleaves – EON Director

Tomohiro Usui – Associate Principal Investigator

Tony Jia –  Research Scientist

Yuka Fujii –  Project Associate Professor

Keiko Hamano –  Research Scientist

Hidenori Genda – Associate Principal Investigator

Tomohiro Mochizuki –  Research Scientist

Premise of the Workshop:

The trans-disciplinary field of astrobiology ambitions to determine whether life exists beyond Earth. This astrobiological quest is extremely crucial for comprehending the intricate processes occurring on the early Earth that led to the origin of carbon-based life. Organic and potentially prebiotic molecules have been identified on numerous Solar System objects. But, none of these identified molecules, nor the identifying instruments can as yet determine the presence of life.

The Earth Life Science Institute (ELSI) is a hub bridging experimental and theoretical approaches to astrobiology and origin of life. The objective of this ELSI workshop is to deliberate on the advances, demands, and strategies for constructing and operating applicable ‘life detection’ technologies to be used on Mars, Enceladus, and other potentially habitable objects, which are targeted for exploration in the first-half of the 21^st century.

Organizer: Carlos Mariscal, University of Nevada

Science Organizing Committee:  Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill, Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Cambridge University;  Nigel Goldenfeld, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Piet Hut, Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology; Betül Kaçar, Harvard University; Nathaniel Virgo, Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology; Mary Voytek, NASA; Sara Walker, Arizona State University

Venue: ELSI Hall in ELSI-1 bldg., Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.

Abstract: Universal Biology, or the study of what we can expect would be the case for life everywhere, is an area of interest to a wide variety of researchers in fields as diverse as artificial life, ecology, planetary science, and biochemistry. Experts in myriad fields propose, justify, and assess the most robust expectations for life. This workshop will gather intellectually curious experts working across extremely diverse disciplines in order to develop a common language, assumptions, and categorization schema of non-Earth specific phenomena in biology. We would like to build an ongoing network of international and multidisciplinary scholars working on these issues. By bridging jargon and conceptual barriers, we hope to derive understandings which have been revealed independently through related disciplines. We may even be able to infer new candidate generalizations which may never arise independently of such interactions.

Participants will be asked to give brief overview of their research, detailing lessons these may imply for other biological systems. We will have ample time for discussion and break out groups as well as time for planning ahead to future workshops.

In short, the aim of this workshop will be to develop a common understanding, write or collaborate on articles for a special edition of a journal, and start ongoing collaborations focused on detailing the biological properties scientists strongly believe will apply to life everywhere in the universe, independent of contingent facts about Earth. We will strive to clearly separate conclusions derived from chemistry, mechanics, ecological interaction, evolutionary exchange, modeling, and so on.

Speakers

Carlos Mariscal (Nevada)
Piet Hut (ELSI/IAS)
Nathaniel Virgo (EON)
Kunihiko Kaneko (UBI)
Chris Kempes (SFI)
Cole Mathis (ASU)

Jennifer Hoyal-Cuthill (EON)
Doug Erwin (Smithsonian Institute)
Pablo Marquet (Pontifico Universidad Catolica de Santiago/SFI)
Paul Turner (Yale)
Hanon McShea (Harvard)
Kate Adamala (Minnesota)
Mike Travisiano (Minnesota)
Lynn Rothschild (Brown/NASA Ames)

Farshid Jafarpour (Purdue)
William Bains (MIT)
Jessica Flack (SFI)
David G. Lynn (HHMI)

Venue: ELSI Hall in ELSI-1 bldg., Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.

Title:    Cosmic Perspective of Earth: A Planet Permeated and Shaped by Life – Implications for Astrobiology

Conveners:  

Marjorie Chan – Professor, University of Utah

Jim Cleaves – EON Director, Earth-Life Science Institute

Penelope Boston –Director, NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI)

Pervasive Life Perspective

Life permeates Earth’s surface. All of Earth’s surface water, and probably its subsurface fluid, has been “contaminated” with microbes since at least 3.5 Ga. Given the vast time that Earth has been teeming with life, do we even know what an “abiotic habitable planet” looks like?

Scientists now recognize the strong interdependent linkages of biology, chemistry, and geology- giving rise to the disciplines of geomicrobiology and astrobiology. To determine whether life exists elsewhere in the Universe, it will be necessary to define what constitutes a biosignature or a biomarker, and how extant life would be preserved (taphonomy) and recognized. Researchers have focused on Earth’s critical zone – the near surface environment of complex interactions between rock, soil, air, water, and life. We generally assume every organic compound, mineral assemblage and texture is abiotic unless we can definitively show a biotic influence. However, how would our research questions change if we assume that all we see on Earth is biotic unless we can prove it is abiotic?

Our workshop hypothesis is: Everything on Earth influenced by water is inseparably coupled with life. We do not really know what “abiotic” environments look like on the Earth’s surface. How can we best test and evaluate abiotic conditions? Do we know what the limits and boundaries of life are? The astonishing resilience of extremophiles suggests that life might extend beyond the currently known limits, i.e., there are “long tails” of life outside of the norms.
Workshop participants from a wide range of disciplines are invited to bring their expertise to address this hypothesis and the difficulties that an Earth-based bias of evaluating biomarkers brings to astrobiology exploration.

Organizers: Matthew Egbert ¹     Martin Hanczyc ^2
1 Lecturer, University of Auckland, NZ                   
² Principal Investigator, Centre for Integrative Biology, University of Trento, Italy

Venue: ELSI Hall in ELSI-1 bldg., Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.

Title: Sensors, Motors and Behaviour at the Origin of Life

Behaviour precedes evolution

The behaviour of modern organisms often involves intricate sensors and sophisticated motors that are too complicated to have spontaneously emerged in a prebiotic world. Evolution was required to produce these structures and for this reason, it might seem counterintuitive to consider the possibility that behaviour existed before evolution. However, numerous simple physical systems demonstrate surprisingly life-like behaviours. Motile oil-droplets (e.g., Hanczyc et al. 2014), autocatalytic reaction-diffusion spots (Virgo 2011), and ramified charge-transportation networks (Kondepudi et al. 2015) all move toward environments that benefit their persistence and away from damaging environments. These systems thus demonstrate a pre-biotic form of self-preservation, which in turn suggests that functionalities typically associated with life, such as sensing and actuating could have been available in pre-evolutionary contexts. In this workshop we will consider in detail what kinds of sensors, motors and behaviors might have been available to the earliest organisms and proto-organisms, and the role that these systems might have played in facilitating the emergence of life.

One focus of the workshop will be upon metabolism-based behaviours, where instead of responding directly to environmental properties (such as the presence of sugar), organisms act in response to how efficiently their metabolism is operating (e.g. in response to the state of the electron transport system). This kind of behaviour is observed in various modern bacteria (see e.g. Alexandre et al., 2000), and it is directly comparable to the mechanisms underlying the pre-biotic self-preserving behaviours mentioned above.

A number of recent theoretical contributions have suggested that metabolism-based behaviors can improve robustness, adaptivity and evolvability, by

(1) driving behaviour that responds appropriately to phenomena that neither they nor their ancestors have ever previously experienced (Egbert et al. 2012);

(2) driving behaviour that takes into account the history of the organism, such as which resources it has recently acquired, if it has sustained damaged, if a symbiont or parasite is affecting its metabolic dynamics etc. (Egbert et al. 2009; 2010; 2012, Egbert & Perez-Mercader, 2016);

(3) integrating numerous and simultaneous environmental effects into a coherent and self-preserving response without requiring any extra “computational” machinery for weighing the influence of the different factors (Egbert et al. 2009; 2010).

(4) allowing an organism to compensate behaviorally for changes in its internal operation, such as modification to a metabolic pathway (Egbert et al. 2010; 2012; Egbert & Perez-Mercader, 2016).

Given that metabolism-based behaviour (i) improves robustness, adaptivity and evolvability; (ii) is found in simple physical systems that almost certainly predate biological evolution and (iii) is also found in modern organisms, we set out to investigate The Origins of Behaviour in the context of the Origins of Life.

The invited participants come from a wide variety of backgrounds including experts in bacterial chemotaxis, complex chemical and physical systems, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, computational modelling of complex biological systems, mathematical modelling of sensorimotor-based adaptive behaviour, artificial life, synthetic biology and artificial chemistry. It is our hope that gathering this group together will provide a community that will foster innovative inter- and trans-disciplinary research.

 List of speakers

(the following schedule is tentative)

Day 1:

Matthew Egbert
Martin Hanczyc
Gladys Alexandre
Jim Dixon
Alex Penn

Day 2:

Xabier Barandiaran
Dilip Kondipudi
Nathaniel Virgo
Paul Schlumbom
Takashi Ikegami
Takeshi Sugawara
Emily Parke
Taro Toyota

Day 3:

Tom Froese
Karen Ottemann
Eduardo Izquierdo
Jitka Cejovka
Peter Cariani

 Relevant Literature

Alexandre G, Greer SE, Zhulin IB. Energy Taxis Is the Dominant Behavior in Azospirillum brasilense. Journal of Bacteriology. 2000;182(21):6042-6048.

Bartlett, S and Bullock S (2015) Emergence of competition between different dissipative structures for the same free energy source. In Advances in Artificial Life, ECAL 2015. MIT Press, 415-422

Braitenberg V (1986) Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Brooks R (1991) Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence. 47(1–3):139–59.

Kondepudi D, Kay B, and Dixon J (2015) End-directed evolution and the emergence of energy-seeking behavior in a complex system. Phys. Rev. E 91, 050902(R)

Egbert M, Pérez-Mercader J. (2016) Adapting to Adaptations: Behavioural Strategies that are Robust to Mutations and Other Organisational-Transformations. Scientific Reports. 6 (Article number: 18963).

Egbert M, Barandiaran X, Di Paolo E. (2012) Behavioral Metabolution: The Adaptive and Evolutionary Potential of Metabolism-Based Chemotaxis. Artificial Life. 18(1):1-25.

Egbert M, Barandiaran X, Di Paolo E. (2010) A Minimal Model of Metabolism-Based Chemotaxis. PLoS Computational Biology.6(12):e1001004.

Egbert M, Di Paolo E, Barandiaran X. (2009) Chemo-ethology of an Adaptive Protocell: Sensorless sensitivity to implicit viability conditions in Proceedings of the Tenth European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL09, Budapest. Springer, Berlin.

Froese T, Virgo N and Ikegami T (2014) Motility at the Origin of Life: Its Characterization and a Model Artificial Life 20:1, 55-76

Hanczyc M (2014) Droplets: Unconventional Protocell Model with Life-Like Dynamics and Room to Grow. Life 4.4: 1038-1049.

Hanczyc M (2011) Metabolism and motility in prebiotic structures Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 366 pps. 2885-2893

Hanczyc N, Ikegami T (2010) Chemical basis for minimal cognition Artificial Life 16 (3), 233-243

Hanczyc M, Toyota T, Ikegami T, Packard N, Sugawara T (2007)Fatty Acid Chemistry at the Oil−Water Interface:  Self-Propelled Oil Droplets Journal of the American Chemical Society 129 (30), 9386-9391 DOI: 10.1021/ja0706955

Izquierdo E, Beer R, (2016) The whole worm: brain–body–environment models of C. elegans, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 40, Pages 23-30, ISSN 0959-4388

Nicolis, Gregoire, and Ilya Prigogine. Self-organization in nonequilibrium systems. Wiley, New York, 1977.

Noireaux V, Libchaber A (2004) A vesicle bioreactor as a step toward an artificial cell assembly PNAS 21;101(51):17669–74.

Virgo N (2011) Thermodynamics and the structure of living systems. Doctoral thesis (DPhil), University of Sussex.

Organizer: Daniel Merkle, Eric Smith, Jakob Andersen
Co-Organizer: Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology

Venue: ELSI Hall in ELSI-1 bldg., Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.　October 10 : registration starts at 9:00am, session starts at 9:30am

Title: Computational chemistry: from components to systems and back

Abstract:

Computational and formal methods for modeling and analysis of chemicals and chemical reaction systems have made enormous progress especially within the past decade.  Structure-generating algorithms now enable the systematic enumeration of molecule forms from atomic-level constraints, while process-modeling methods based on graph grammars permit the recursive elaboration of reaction systems from elementary mechanisms.  Automated and machine-learning methods are successfully being applied to the characterization of reactions, the discovery of pathways, and more sophisticated application of existing methods such as Density Functional Theory.  Expansions in databases both for reaction mechanisms and for thermodynamic parameters increase the power of automated modeling to characterize particular systems in quantitative detail, and to link topological characteristics to directionality and kinetics of reactions.

In parallel with these advances in practical application, the discipline required by formalization clarifies chemical concepts that are inherently complex and often used flexibly in practice, such as notions of pathway and auto- or cross-catalysis.  More abstractly, a group of fundamental theorems are known, which relate the topology of the hypergraphs describing chemical reaction systems to the ranges of both deterministic and stochastic dynamics possible on those systems.

These advances promise to qualitatively change the ways we study systems chemistry and pose questions about the origin of life.  They provide both concepts and tools to bootstrap our thinking about chemistry from components to systems; inversely, from desired properties of systems, they may enable us to search for or construct chemistries which are eligible to produce them.  At the same time, this recent work furnishes a number of new abstractions of topological and dynamical organization, which are of interest in their own right from perspectives of computer science, mathematics, and physics.

The goal of our workshop is to bring together the leading edge of concepts and methods in computational chemistry with theoretical and applied problems in systems chemistry and the origin of life.  We wish to form a synthesis across these domains, to acquaint practitioners in each domain with the most interesting ideas and problems in other domains, to identify the most important and timely problems in computational chemistry on which to focus effort over the next 5-10 year timeframe, and to aid the establishment of standards and shared resources to solve them.

The four-day workshop will cover the following topics: New methods from discrete math, graph theory, process calculus, and concurrency theory; States, processes, energetics, and kinetics; Multi-level and multi-conceptual modeling architectures; Relations of topology to dynamics; Machine learning methods and applications, including non-parametric inference; Standards, database efforts, and information mining; Systems-chemistry’s unmet needs; Applications to the Origin of Life.

Elizabeth Tasker, Joshua Tan, Kevin Heng, Stephen Kane, David Spiegel & the ELSI Origins Network Planetary Diversity Workshop

We have found many Earth-sized worlds but we have no way of determining if their surfaces are Earth-like. This makes it impossible to quantitatively compare habitability, and pretending we can risks damaging the field.

See more at: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0042

Date: 4-6th Feb. 2017
(registration deadline: 15 Dec. 2016)

Venue: Dasheri Auditorium, National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, India

For website: https://www.ncbs.res.in/events/evolution-biological-complexity