Weeknote #42

Much to report; the European Conference on Artificial Life was held in Paris at the start of the month. Our COBRA project organized a satellite workshop the day before the main conference, which went very well. Our meeting covered the broad area of "biological and chemical IT", and topics included synthetic biology, artificial cells and robotics. A special issue of the journal BioSystems will be edited around the themes of the meeting, with an open call for papers to be issued shortly.

We're fortunate enough to have one of the artificial life pioneers (Steen Rasmussen) as a COBRA collaborator (another pioneer, Norman Packard, is also involved via the European Center for Living Technology in Venice) , and their panel discussion was entertaining and thought-provoking. Steen has blogged about this (and the wider conference) here.

Our Ph.D. students Matthew Crossley and Henry Dorrian recently attended the Student Conference on Complexity Sciences in Winchester, which sounds like exactly the sort of thing I wish had been around when I was a student (I did attend the Santa Fe Institute complex systems summer school in 1995, but that was for a whole month). Anyway, Henry presented a poster, and Matthew gave a talk, both of which were very well-received. Indeed, Matthew reported that one of the invited speakers, Robert May (AKA The Lord May of Oxford, former President of the Royal Society and Chief Scientific Advisor to the government, among his many roles) had quietly taken him to one side to offer particular praise and encouragement for his work on agent-based models of epidemiology, and how they might be used in public engagement/education activities. To say that Matthew was "chuffed" might be a slight under-statement...

We were delighted by a recent review of Litmus, which appeared in the Independent a couple of weeks ago. Peter Forbes (I'm an admirer of his book The Gecko's Foot) describes the collection as "...not a test but an open sesame into some of science's most intriguing passages." I was also pleased to see that the morphogenesis story written by Jane Rogers (for which I acted as scientific consultant and wrote the afterword) attracted particular attention in the review. Jane's just been long-listed for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, so well done and good luck to her! Litmus is available to buy here, and now might also be a good time to plug an event Jane and I are doing in October, jointly with the Manchester Science and Literature Festivals (details to right).

Finally, as I was typing this note I got an email from Springer to tell me that the journal version of our paper on using genetic algorithms to solve the Zen Puzzle Garden game has now appeared in print in the journal Natural Computing. I'm particularly pleased about this paper, not because it's hugely ground-breaking, but because it originated from an undergraduate student project.

Although Paris was half-and-half work and pleasure (I was accompanied by my wife, while our daughter stayed with her grand-parents in Northumberland), next week really is a holiday (visiting family in Suffolk). That means IMAP server passwords deleted from my phone, no tweeting, the lot. I'm sure it will do me good.

Weeknote #21 (w/e/ 10/10/10)

I've been a little remiss in terms of weeknote updates. Last week was mainly spent getting into a reasonably high teaching gear for the new term. I have a few good project students this year, so I'm hopeful that we can continue the trend of working on papers together.

Last Monday I spent an enjoyable evening at the Wilmslow Guild, giving a lecture on synthetic biology as part of their Science Matters series. The turnout was good (over fifty people), and I was asked some incisive questions. I was rather flustered on arrival, however, as I only just made it, due to the "navigation" software on my new phone insisting that I was actually driving around Wimbledon (London!), instead of getting increasingly worried in Cheshire. Do not trust the navigation software on the Samsung Galaxy Europa (it's an absolutely lovely little phone otherwise).

Speaking of all things to do with public engagement, we've finalised the line-up for our forthcoming event at the Manchester Science Festival, and it's absolutely cracking. We have Ron Weiss, one of the leaders in the field of synthetic biology coming from MIT in the US, Maureen O'Malley from Exeter, who works at the intersection of the humanities and life sciences, and Steve Yearley from Edinburgh, who's the Director of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum.

The event is titled Artificial Life: Promises and Pitfalls, and full details are available on the website.

The Novel Computation Group lab is now full to capacity, with the arrival of the final Ph.D. student in the current "batch". We also have a new post-doc working on our NIB DNA hash-pooling project, are interviewing this week for a BACTOCOM post-doc, and have two new undergraduate students joining us for the duration of their projects.