BIOLOGICAL CIRCUITS

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERINGDISTINGUISHED LECTURER SERIES"BIOLOGICAL CIRCUITS"Prof. Jehoshua (Shuki) BruckComputation and Neural Systems and Electrical EngineeringCalifornia Institute of TechnologyAbstract:Motivated by the intriguing functionality of gene regulatory networks we study chemical reactions (biological) circuits. We observe that those circuits are vastly different when compared to existing computing structures like logic circuits. In particular, the two strikingly different ingredients in biological circuits are feedback in memoryless computation and the stochastic behavior of devices in deterministic systems. Are these two biologically inspired concepts useful in improving the design of existing computing structures? I will provide a positive answer to this question and argue that progress in our understanding of biology depends on the development of new abstractions for reasoning about computation.Bio:Jehoshua (Shuki) Bruck is the Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Computation and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He was the founding Director of the Caltech Information Science and Technology (IST) program. His research combines work on the design of distributed information systems and the theoretical study of biological circuits and systems. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1982 and 1985, respectively and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1989. Dr. Bruck has an extensive industrial experience, including working with IBM Research for ten years where he participated in the design and implementation of the first IBM parallel computer. He was co-founder and Chairman of Rainfinity (acquired in 2005 by EMC), a spin-off company from Caltech that focused on software products for management of network information systems. Dr. Bruck is a Fellow of the IEEE, the recipient of an IBM Partnership Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, six IBM Plateau Invention Achievement Awards, an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award and an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award. He published more than 200 journal and conference papers in his areas of interests and he holds 25 US patents. His papers were recognized in journals and conferences, including, winning the 2005 S. A. Schelkunoff Transactions prize paper award from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation society (joint with M. Franceschetti and L. J. Schulman) and the 2003 Best Paper Award in the 2003 Design Automation Conference (joint with M. Riedel). Host: Prof. Keith Chugg, ext. 07294

Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - ontology Auditorium

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Rosine Sarafian