23 December, 2012
Evolutionary Biology and the Theory of Computing
13 January to 16 May, 2014
Evolutionary biology is an intellectually rich field which has advanced remarkably through a synergistic interplay between deep understanding of biology and mathematical techniques, especially from probability and statistics. Over the past several decades, the role of computer science in studying biology has grown enormously, and computation has now become an indispensable part of the intellectual mix. Many current problems in evolutionary biology push the limits of computation, and new algorithmic insights are needed to make progress.
The objective of this program is to promote the interaction between theoretical computer scientists and researchers from evolutionary biology, physics, probability, and statistics. The participants of the program will collaborate to identify and tackle some of the most important theoretical and computational challenges arising from evolutionary biology. The major themes of the program will be sound mathematical modeling, rigorous methods for statistical estimation, and computational scalability.
Organizers:
Yun S. Song (UC Berkeley; chair), Andrew G. Clark (Cornell), Rick Durrett (Duke), Charles H. Langley (UC Davis), Christos Papadimitriou (UC Berkeley), Leslie Valiant (Harvard).
Long-Term Participants (in addition to Organizers):
Nick Barton (IST Austria), Graham Coop (UC Davis), Costis Daskalakis (MIT), Alison Etheridge (Oxford), Steven Evans (UC Berkeley), Marc Feldman (Stanford), Vitaly Feldman (IBM Almaden), Daniel Fisher (Stanford), Dan Gusfield (UC Davis), Oskar Hallatschek (UC Berkeley), Eran Halperin (Tel Aviv), Joachim Hermisson (Vienna), John Huelsenbeck (UC Berkeley), Varun Kanade (UC Berkeley), Sampath Kannan (U Penn), Adi Livnat (Virginia Tech), Gerton Lunter (Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics), Gil McVean (Oxford), Elchanan Mossel (UC Berkeley), Rasmus Nielsen (UC Berkeley), Lior Pachter (UC Berkeley), Nick Patterson (Broad Institute), Lea Popovic (Concordia), Satish Rao (UC Berkeley), Sebastien Roch (University of Wisconsin), Eric Siggia (Rockefeller), Montgomery Slatkin (UC Berkeley), Wolfgang Stephan (LMU Munich), Greg Valiant (Stanford), Paul Valiant (Brown), Nisheeth Vishnoi (Microsoft Research India).
Workshops:
During the semester there will be three workshops spanning the topics of the program. These are planned as follows:
Workshop 1 : “Computation-Intensive Probabilistic and Statistical Methods for Large-Scale Population Genomics.” Organizers: Andrew G. Clark (Cornell), Rasmus Nielsen (UC Berkeley), Yun S. Song (UC Berkeley).
Workshop 2: “Computational Theories of Evolution.” Organizers: Christos Papadimitriou (UC Berkeley), Leslie Valiant (Harvard).
Workshop 3 : “New Directions in Probabilistic Models of Evolution.” Organizers: Rick Durrett (Duke), Steven Evans (UC Berkeley).
http://simons.berkeley.edu/program_evolution2014.html