Colonies of Synchronizing Agents: Computability and Robustness

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• Radu Mardare, CoSBi
• Tuesday 18 November 2008, 14:00-15:00
• Small public lecture room, Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road), Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Fabien Petitcolas.

Abstract: We introduce a modelling framework and computational paradigm called Colonies of Synchronizing Agents (CSAs), which abstracts intracellular and intercellular mechanisms of biological tissues. The model is based on a multiset of agents (cells) in a common environment (a tissue). Each agent has a local content, stored in the form of a multiset of atomic objects (e.g., representing molecules), updated by multiset rewriting rules which may act on individual agents (intracellular action) or synchronize the contents of pairs of agents (intercellular action).

The talk focuses on the dynamics of CSAs with a special interest in defining and proving various types of robustness. We show that the notion of robustness relies on a notion of bisimulation on colonies. We characterize the concept logically. The algebraic/coalgebraic structure of the CSAs allows playing with various types of modal logics, each supporting a specific notion of robustness. For some of them we will show decidability results.

Biography: Radu Mardare received his PhD in Computer Science in March 2006, from DIT , University of Trento (Italy), with a thesis on Modal Logics for concurrent-distributed systems. Mardare holds a Master’s of Science in Logic (Bucharest University, Romania, 2002), with a thesis on Model Theory. He holds two bachelor degrees: one in Mathematics (1997, “Al.I. Cuza” University, Iasi, Romania), with a thesis on Set Theory, and one in Philosophy (2001, Bucharest University, Romania), with a thesis on Ontology of Mathematics. Until October 2006 Mardare was a postdoctoral researcher at DIT , University of Trento. Mardare’s most recent research is on logics for concurrent-distributed (multi-agent) systems. The general problem has to do with modelling and reasoning about information flow and information exchange between spatially located (but potentially mobile), interconnected agents having potential applications in Systems Biology (studying interrelations between biological agents), Secure Communication (checking secrecy and authentication for given communication protocols), Artificial Intelligence (endowing artificial agents with good and flexible tools to reason about their changing environment and about each other), designing and improving strategies for knowledge acquisition over complex networks (such as the Internet), etc. The main thrust of Mardare’s research has been in the direction of finding decidable and completely axiomatised logics for process semantics.

This talk is part of the CoSBi Computational and Systems Biology Series series.

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