AF: 4th Workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms (BDA 2016)

生物分布式算法（BDA）研讨会的目标是将有兴趣研究分布式算法和分布式生物系统（包括蚁群、黏菌、免疫系统和大脑）之间关系的计算机科学家和生物学家聚集在一起。工作坊将包括邀请讲座，以及由工作坊计划委员会选出的口头和海报展示。这是BDA第四次会议。今年，该研讨会将与首次召开的分布式计算会议PODC同时举行。2015年，BDA在马萨诸塞州波士顿的麻省理工学院举办了为期两天的独立研讨会。2013年和2014年，BDA与另一个顶级分布式计算会议DISC分别在德克萨斯州奥斯汀和以色列耶路撒冷举行。每年，我们都看到越来越多的参与者和提交。所寻求的资金将用于为10-15名学生和博士后（包括妇女和少数民族）提供旅费支助，以便参加讲习班并展示他们的作品（口头或海报）。由于年轻的研究人员，特别是学生和博士后，往往是成功的跨学科合作的推动力，我们将在即将到来的BDA会议上把大部分时间用于学生和博士后的作品。我们在过去BDA会议上的经验表明，学生和博士后往往难以获得此类活动的旅费，因此我们将通过提供慷慨的旅费资助来鼓励他们参与。我们希望向年轻的研究人员介绍这个令人兴奋和新兴的跨学科研究领域，并帮助他们为未来建立合作关系。分布式系统在计算机科学和生物学中很流行。这两个领域都依赖于相互作用的实体网络——生物学中的分子、细胞和有机体；计算机科学中的传感器，移动和自主机器人设备-协调输出响应输入，路由资源，并在环境中导航。这两种类型的系统还寻求解决这些问题的方案，这些解决方案本质上是有效的、健壮的，并且能够适应自然和竞争环境中预期的变化。这些联系表明，通过对分布式生物系统中信息处理的设置、要求和目标进行计算思考，我们可以实现两个互补的目标：首先，我们可以利用对生物系统如何解决计算问题的见解来帮助设计更灵活、更健壮、更自适应的分布式算法。其次，我们可以使用、发展或调整现有的分布式计算理论来帮助理解生物系统的行为，并提出新的、可测试的假设，以确定这些模型与观察到的生物系统行为的匹配程度。通过将生物学家和计算机科学家聚集在一起，我们的目标是使这两个领域能够相互提供的重要而及时的想法相互融合。

The goal of the Biological Distributed Algorithms (BDA) workshop is to bring together computer scientists and biologists interested in studying the relationships between distributed algorithms and distributed biological systems, including ant colonies, slime molds, the immune system, and the brain. The workshop will include invited talks together with oral and poster presentations selected by the workshop's program committee. This is the 4th BDA meeting. This year, the workshop will be co-located with a premiere distributed computing conference, PODC. In 2015, BDA was held as a stand-alone 2-day workshop at MIT in Boston, MA. In 2013 and 2014, BDA was co-located with another premiere distributed computing conference, DISC, in Austin, TX and Jerusalem, Israel, respectively. Each year, we have seen growing attendance and submissions. The funds sought will be used to provide travel support for 10-15 students and post-docs, including women and minorities, to attend and present their work (oral or poster) at the workshop. Since young researchers, especially students and postdocs, tend to be the driving force behind successful interdisciplinary collaborations, we will dedicate most of the slots in the upcoming BDA meeting to works presented by students and postdocs. Our experience in the past BDA meetings shows that students and postdocs often have difficulty securing travel funds for such events, therefore we will encourage their participation by offering them generous travel grants. We hope to introduce young researchers to this exciting and emerging area of cross-disciplinary research, and help them establish collaborations for the future. Distributed systems are prevalent in computer science and biology. Both domains rely on networks of interacting entities - molecules, cells, and organisms in biology; sensor, mobile, and autonomous robot devices in computer science - to coordinate output responses to inputs, route resources, and navigate through environments. Both types of systems also seek solutions to these problems that are inherently efficient, robust, and adaptive with respect to changes expected in natural and competitive environments. These connections suggest that by thinking computationally about the settings, requirements, and goals of information processing within distributed biological systems, we can achieve two complementary goals: First, we can use insights about how biological systems solve computational problems to aid in designing more flexible, robust, and adaptive distributed algorithms. Second, we 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. By bringing together both biologists and computer scientists, we aim to cross-fertilize the important and timely ideas that both domains can offer to one another.