Evolution and Evolutionary Algorithms

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution) Theodosius Dobzhansky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky)

Evolution is the creative force of life on earth. How is our view of the evolutionary process changing with the deluge of biological data?

What insights can an evolutionary view give us into the functioning of living systems?

Computer algorithms inspired by views of the evolutionary process have created electronic circuits that break human designed patents, but they do not scale well to larger problems. Can we learn lessons from nature's evolutionary processes to create deeper, more scalable, evolutionary algorithms?

We will have talks and discussion. Talks are welcome anywhere from 1 minute to 30+ :) Message me if you would like to talk for 10 minutes or more. We have a computer and projector.

While the meeting's main focus will be evolution and evolutionary algorithms, we welcome talks on any topic related to the intersection of biology and computers, in the broadest sense. The talks should have at least some interest to a general audience - we are all beginners in some of these topics.

Talks, so far:

Using networks to enhance genome wide association studies - Richard Nichols (http://www.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/staff/richardnichols.html)

An introduction to bionode (http://www.bionode.io/) - bioinformatics pipelines in Javascript - Bruno Vieira

With plenty of time for discussion!

More to come. If you want to speak drop me a line..