2nd Workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms (BDA 2014)

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General description:The goal of the workshop is to bring together computer scientists and biologists interested in studying the relationships between distributed algorithms and biological systems with the aim of benefiting both fields through joint studies.Distributed systems are prevalent in computer science and biology. Both domains rely on networks of interacting entities - molecules, cells, and organisms in biology; mobile and autonomous robot devices in computer science - to reach joint decisions, coordinate responses to inputs, and to route resources and navigate through challenging environments. Both also seek solutions to these problems that are efficient, robust, and adaptive with respect to changes expected in natural and competitive environments. To explore these shared properties and goals and to determine whether progress made in one of these domains can be used to assist work in the other domain, PIs have organized the BDA workshop to bring together scientists from both areas for a two day meeting in Austin. TX.Technical description:The connections mentioned above between the two areas suggest that by thinking computationally about the settings, requirements, and goals of information processing within distributed biological systems, researchers can achieve two complementary goals: First, they can use insights about how biological systems solve computational problems to aid in designing more flexible, robust, and adaptive novel distributed algorithms. Second, they can use, develop, or adapt existing distributed computing theory to help understand the behavior of biological systems and propose new, testable hypotheses to determine how well such models fit the observed behavior of the biological system. To enable such cross-disciplinary research, PIs have organized the BDA workshop. For this year's workshop, the plan is to primarily focus on relationships between distributed problems in computer science and problems related to communication and coordination in insect colonies (e.g. foraging, navigation, task allocation, construction) and to networks in the brain (e.g. learning, decision-making, attention). Other topics for submissions include: synchronization, communication models inspired by biological systems, and flocking behavior.The workshop will have invited talks from leaders in both the distributed computing and biological communities. There will also be contributed talks from researchers working in the interface of the two domains and a poster session presenting early stage work linking biological and computational distributed computing. To leverage existing interest amongst computer scientists, the workshop is co-located with one of the premiere and long-standing conferences in distributed computing (DISC: The International Symposium on Distributed Computing), which will be held in Austin, TX in October 2014.