Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Brane Calculi in Reykjavík

Yesterday, Nadia Busi (University of Bologna) delivered a seminar entitled Expressiveness Issues in Bio-Inspired Calculi at ICE-TCS@Reykjavík University. The seminar presented results pertaining to the Turing-completeness of variants on Brane Calculi - a family of process calculi based on a set of biologically inspired primitives for modeling the interactions of dynamically nested membranes that have been recently proposed by Luca Cardelli. Two basic Brane Calculi have been proposed: the Phago/Exo/Pino (PEP) calculus, inspired by the biological operations of endocytosis and exocytosis, and the Mate/Bud/Drip (MBD) calculus, inspired by membrane fusion and fission. Nadia presented some interesting results on the comparison of the expressiveness of the PEP and the MBD calculi, as well as of their deterministic fragments, with respect to their ability to perform computations. The talk generated some interest amongst the participants, including some of our own MSc students.

Nadia's talk inaugurated a new seminar series under the auspices of ICE-TCS. This series aims at highlighting the achievements of women in TCS, and will hopefully help us convince some of the bright, local, female students that TCS is a subject for them.

Only time will tell whether this will work.

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