NSF Workshop on Biologically Enabled Wireless Networks

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Over the last decade, wireless networks have achieved major successes and emerged as the key technology for enabling ubiquitous access to information. However, several challenges remain, energy-efficiency being one of the most notable. At the same time, bio-organisms are well known for energy efficiency. From the brain that performs outstandingly complex tasks with only few tens of watts, to the ear that carries the equivalent of billion floating-point operations per second, biological systems are orders of magnitude more efficient than state of the art wireless systems. A natural, although challenging, question is if we can build biologically enabled wireless networks. Several research communities have been working on new biologically enabled computation and communication paradigms, the biophysics and biomedical communities have been exploring ways to remotely interact with biological organisms. However, these communities rarely interact with each other. This workshop?s goal is to bring them together, articulate a vision for biologically-enabled wireless networks, and define a clear set of challenges to be solved and recommendations for future inter-disciplinary collaborations in this emerging area. Experts from several communities will present the state of the art in (1) enabling mechanisms for bio-networks, such as electromagnetic energy harvesting and transduction into biological signals, and magnetic control of biological systems, (2) molecular computation and communication networks considering both the fundamental information and computation theoretic issues and system design, and (3) synthetic biology as a way to engineer biologically enabled wireless devices but also how biologically enabled devices can be made less sensitive to their environment.