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UW-Madison
Computer Sciences Dept.

Biology as Computation

Leslie Valiant
Harvard University
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
4:00 p.m. in 1221 CS
(cookies at 3:30 in 2310 CS)

Abstract: We argue that computational models have an essential role in uncovering the principles behind a variety of biological phenomena. In particular we consider recent results relating to the following three questions: How can brains, given their known resource constraints such as the sparsity of connections and slow elements, do any significant information processing at all? How can evolution, in only a few billion years, evolve such complex mechanisms as it has? How can cognitive systems manipulate large amounts of such uncertain knowledge and get usefully reliable results? We show that each of these problems can be formulated as a quantitative question for a computational model, and argue that solutions to these formulations provide some understanding of these biological phenomena.

Speaker's Bio: Leslie Valiant was educated at King's College, Cambridge; Imperial College, London; and at Warwick University where he received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1974. He is currently T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, where he has taught since 1982. Before coming to Harvard he had taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, Leeds University, and the University of Edinburgh. His work has ranged over several areas of theoretical computer science, particularly complexity theory, computational learning, and parallel computation. He also has interests in computational neuroscience, evolution and artificial intelligence. He received the Nevanlinna Prize at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986 and the Knuth Award in 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

 
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