1 February 2005 Concurrency Column for the February Issue of BEATCS
A brief posting to break the silence on these pages since my last posting---now lost in the midst of time.
One of the most exciting recent applications of process calculi is in the field of systems biology. Paraphrasing the title of an excellent survey paper by Christos Papadimitriou, this is an example of the ``extroverted'' use of concurrency theory in a fast-developing science, where notions from our research area may, perhaps surprisingly, be even more appropriate than in software engineering. Possibly, the main ``grand challenge'' in this field is to define a set of basic and general primitives for modelling biological systems that are inspired by actual biological processes, and to use these primitives to develop an executable model based on process calculi of some (very) complex biological system. This model could ultimately be used to predict the behaviour of living matter.
This new direction of research in concurrency theory is being pursued by some of the most capable scientists in our field, and there is already a growing body of literature reporting on their work, and appearing in specialized conferences and workshops. The piece by D. Prandi, C. Priami and P. Quaglia entitled Process Calculi in a Biological Context, which I recently posted for the Concurrency Column of the BEATCS, offers a very useful guide to the literature on the use of process calculi in systems biology. The authors of this survey are amongst the prime movers behind the surge of interest in the use of tools from concurrency theory in biology, and they offer a very thoughtful account of the process algebraic languages proposed so far for the description of biological phenomena, discuss their faithfulness to the biological context, and provide a list of interesting lines of research for the future. Enjoy it!
On a related note, congratulations to Ehud Shapiro for making it into the list of 50 Research Leaders for 2004 of Scientific American! I bought a copy of that magazine on my way back to Iceland after a week of exams in Aalborg, and was pleased to see one of our colleagues honoured for his work on a DNA computer that diagnoses cancer and then releases a drug to treat it. Such level of visibility can only be good for our science.
Last modified: Tuesday, 01-Feb-2005 10:55:19 CET.