Programs | Spring 2014Evolutionary 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), Michael Desai (Harvard), 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 (Univ of Vienna), John Huelsenbeck (UC Berkeley), Varun Kanade (UC Berkeley), Sampath Kannan (U Penn), Joachim Krug (Univ of Cologne), 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), Peter Pfaffelhuber (Univ of Freiburg), Lea Popovic (Concordia), Satish Rao (UC Berkeley), Sebastien Roch (U Wisconsin), Eric Siggia (Rockefeller), Montgomery Slatkin (UC Berkeley), Mike Steel (U Canterbury), Wolfgang Stephan (LMU Munich), Greg Valiant (Stanford), Paul Valiant (Brown), Nisheeth Vishnoi (Microsoft Research India).

Research Fellows:

Claudia Bank (EPFL), Anand Bhaskar (UC Berkeley), Shishi Luo (Duke), Iain Mathieson (Oxford), Sriram Sankararaman (Harvard), Daniel Weissman (IST Austria), Daniel Živković (LMU Munich), James Zou (Harvard).

Workshops:

During the semester there will be three workshops spanning the topics of the program, as well as a Boot Camp designed to acquaint participants with key material early in the semester. These are planned as follows:

Participation:

Those interested in participating in this program should send email to the organizers at this address.