Reprogramming Biology with F#

** PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DATE AND VENUE **

If we could program biology as effectively as we program digital computers, we could make fundamental breakthroughs in the treatment of disease and the biofabrication of materials, while gaining insight into the workings of life itself. I'll talk about how we use F# and:

• domain specific languages (FParsec)
• property-based testing (FsCheck),
• satisfiability analysis (Z3 via the .net bindings) to do this.

I’ll also show demos of our public tools on:

• molecular programming via DNA strand displacement: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/programming-dna-circuits/
• reasoning about stem cell decision making: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/reasoning-engine-for-interaction-networks-rein/

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Colin is a software developer working in the Biological Computation group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, with a background in industrial automation and building analytical devices in the materials, pharmaceuticals, and aerospace industries. He applies this to building reproducible and effective systems in Microsoft Research's wet lab to validate biological designs. He also assists in the optimisation of computational methods to run far more efficiently, and then conveniently scaling over many machines on Azure.