Satellite Workshop at the European Conference on Artificial Life, 2015
http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/nature/ecal2015/

Synthetic Biology’s vision to repurpose living cells as substrates for
general computation has manifested itself in genetic circuit designs
that attempt to implement Boolean logic gates, digital memory,
oscillators, and other circuits from electrical engineering. Yet, the
various achievements in the realm of Synthetic Biology remain isolated
and generally lack the modularity and scalability of their electronic
counterparts.

This ECAL 2015 satellite workshop revisits cornerstone achievements in
Synthetic Biology research that address general computability in
biological substrates, in order to demarcate key in-vivo and in-silico
challenges of this novel research area. Topics will deal with how
paradigms borrowed from digital, electronic devices are best implemented
in large-scale biological substrates, and whether unconventional
computing paradigms, such as those developed in the research field of
Artificial Life, might offer more promising routes toward full-fledged
biological computation.

Invited Speakers:
* Martyn Amos, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
* Friedrich Simmel, Technische Universität München, Germany


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Call for Participation and Abstracts
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This workshop welcomes participants and abstracts from any area of
Synthetic Biology and related fields, including, but not limited to:

* the design and engineering of molecular, cellular and
population-based computation
* domain-specific languages for the specification of biological
computation
* theories and applications of biological computation

We accept abstract submissions for oral and poster presentations.
Abstracts up to 2 pages in length following the formatting guidelines
of the ECAL conference should be submitted to toprob@newcastle.ac.uk.
For details, see
http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/nature/ecal2015/submissions.html


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Important Dates
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* Abstract submission deadline: 17th April 2015
* Notification of acceptance: 15th May 2015
* Workshop date : 20th July 2015
* Conference dates: 20th-24th July 2015


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Organisers
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Harold Fellermann, Omer Markovitch, Owen Gilfellon and Curtis Madsen
Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Biosystems research group
School of Computing Science
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK