News archive

From The P Systems Webpage

Archive

In this section there are announcements made throughout years regards various events, positions etc...


  • May, 20, 2011


First International School on Biomolecular and Biocellular Computing (ISBBC'11)
September 5-7, Osuna, Seville, Spain (see ISBBC-page)


  • September 25, 2008:

PhD position available at Heriot-Watt University, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
under the supervision of Pierluigi Frisco.
There is not a specific topic for this position, it is up to the interested candidate and the supervisor.
For more information, please contact Pierluigi Frisco at pier[at]macs.hw.ac.uk

  • August 1, 2008:

Recent Papers up to WMC9:
Rudolf Freund,Sergey Verlan: (Tissue) P systems working in the k-restricted minimally parallel mode. Click here to download the pdf-file

  • January 28, 2008: Course for PhD students at CoSBi - Trento, Italy

    The Microsoft Research - University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology (CoSBi) organizes a course for PhD students, advanced master students, early stage postdocs and interested junior researchers on methods and recent results on different aspects of computational and systems biology. Students with both experimental and computational/mathematical background are encouraged to apply.
    Dates: 10-14 March, 2008
    Place: CoSBi, Trento, Italy
    Applications are accepted at with poster abstracts.
    Registration fee with lodging: 550 Euros, without lodging: 470 Euros, which includes participation in course, reading materials, coffee breaks, lunches, snacks during poster sessions and gala dinner.
    Registration deadline: 5th February 2008.


  • November 7, 2007: PhD position available in France

    Title: Effective chemical programming for autonomic systems

    Subject: The chemical reaction metaphor describes computation in terms of a chemical solution in which molecules (representing data) interact freely according to reaction rules. Formally, chemical programs can be represented as associative-commutative rewritings (reactions) of multisets (chemical solutions).
    This model of computation is well-suited to the specification of complex computing infrastructures such as large autonomic, Grids and P2P systems. In particular, the orderless interactions between elements that occur in large parallel or open systems as well as autonomicity (e.g. self-healing, self-protection, self-optimization, etc.) are naturally expressed as reaction rules. However, the very high-level nature of chemical programming entails also drawbacks:
    - A direct and naive implementation of chemical programs usually leads to very poor performance.
    - The multiset is a general, flexible but also unstructured data structure. It does not provide a neighborhood relationship useful to represent logical or physical constraints (spatial distribution, localization of resources).

    The goal of the thesis is to address these drawbacks. Several research directions are promising: richer types and data structures, domain-specific languages, topology, aspect and validated implementation.
    Types may be used to structure multisets and describe neighborhood relationships. Domain specific chemical languages allowing an efficient implementation might be sufficiently expressive. It is also possible to extend chemical languages to directly handle organization more sophisticated than multiset. Topological spaces would enable the unification in a same programming language of several computational models. Describing separately implementation issues (such as the evaluation strategy or data representations) in Aspects is a promising approach to produce more low-level and efficient programs. Formal techniques developed in mobile code or in concurrency can be used to validate a distributed implementation.
    The choice among these different research directions will be based upon the background and desires of the PhD student.

    Context: The PhD is supported by AutoChem, a French national project investigating the use of the Chemical paradigm to program complex computing infrastructures such as Grids and real-time deeply-embedded systems.
    The consortium includes teams from Irisa (Rennes), Inria Rhone Alpes (Montbonnot), IBISC (Evry) and CEA List (Saclay). The thesis will be co-located and will involve travels between Grenoble and Evry.

    Required Skills: Candidates should have a Master's or engineering diploma in computer science. A good knowledge and/or interest in programming languages and formal methods is desired.

    Contact/Supervisors:
    Pascal Fradet, PopArt Team, INRIA Grenoble, France, Pascal.Fradet@inria.fr
    Jean-Louis Giavitto, LIS Team, Ibisc Evry, France, giavitto@ibisc.univ-evry.fr

    References:
    Jean-Pierre Banatre, Pascal Fradet, and Daniel Le Mètayer. Gamma and the chemical reaction model: fifteen years after. In Multiset Processing. Springer-Verlag, LNCS, Vol. 2235, 2001.

    Jean-Pierre Banatre, Pascal Fradet and Yann Radenac. Programming Self-Organizing Systems with the Higher-Order Chemical Language. In International Journal of Unconventional Computing, 2006.

    Jean-Louis Giavitto, Olivier Michel. Modeling Developmental Process. In Molecular Computational Models: Unconventional Approaches, Idea Group Publishing, page 150--189, 2004.

    Jean-Louis Giavitto, Olivier Michel and Julien Cohen. Pattern-matching and Rewriting Rules for Group Indexed Data Structure. ACM SIG-PLAN Notices, Vol. 37, n°12, p. 76--87, 2002.
  • September 20, 2007: Postdoc position available in UK
    One PostDoc position for three years is available in UK on Theoretical Computer Science. Information can be found at the web address
    http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/CallsForProposals/PostdoctoralFellowships.htm.
    The deadline for application is October 2, 2007.
    People interested in working at Edinburgh on Membrane Computing should contact Pierluigi Frisco (see e-mail address in TODO:LINK [addresses.html Addresses page]).
  • June 22, 2007: One studentship open to UK or EU candidates ONLY is available from October 2007 for three years. This covers fees plus a stipend at the EPSRC national minimum rate (12,600 GBP/yr for 2007-8). DEADLINE for proposal is July 15, 2007

    Heriot-Watt University (www.hw.ac.uk), located on an attractive campus at the edge of Edinburgh, has a strong record in Computer Science research, receiving a 4A in the UK 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. Recent new appointments have enabled both consolidation of current activity in logics, type theory and intelligent systems and the development of new strong groups in synthetic characters/interactive narrative.

    Potential candidates should have a research proposal in one of the following specific areas relating to the six research groups in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt. Please see http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/cs/resareas/index.htm for further details of research groups.

    Research areas (see http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/cs/resareas/index.htm):

    VISAGE: synthetic characters, affective systems, interactive narrative, graphics textures, interactive educational systems

    ULTRA: computerisation of mathematics, types and rewriting in programming languages and mobility calculi, types in logic and theorem proving

    Intelligent Systems Lab: membrane computing, ambient intelligence, artificial immune systems, artificial neural networks, evolutionary computing

    Dependable Systems Group: formally-motivated computing, systems modelling, programming languages, automated reasoning, parallel/distributed/mobile systems

    Biomedical informatics: distributed intelligent systems, biomedical ontologies,
    representation/reasoning with spatio-temporal data, argumentation systems

    People interested in Membrane Computing area should first contact Pierluigi Frisco (see e-mail address in TODO LINK [addresses.html Addresses page]).

    To apply, please send your CV, research proposal and the names of two academic referees to: ruth@macs.hw.ac.uk with a short covering email which must indicate which research group and specified research area your proposal covers
  • November 17, 2006: A new list of Open Problems in Membrane Computing
    A new list of open problems, proposed by Gheorghe Paun, concerning Spiking Neural P systems is available. TODO LINK [problems.html See the Open Problems page.]
  • April 21, 2006 - Positions available at TUCS, Finland
    Two positions to be filled either on the level of PhD student, or postdoc, are available at the Computational Biomodelling Laboratory, Turku Centre for Computer Science, Finland. The application procedure goes through TUCS, see details at http://www.tucs.fi/ and the deadline this year is May 10, 2006. Interested people can contact Dr. Ion Petre TODO: check CHAR Tilde (http://www.abo.fi/~ipetre/) before or after applying at TUCS. We are looking for mathematicians or computer scientists with a strong interest in problems from, or motivated by biology and biochemisty. Details on our current projects are available at http://combio.abo.fi/


  • March 9, 2006 - New website link to the Computational Biomodelling Laboratory
    The Computational Biomodelling Laboratory at Turku Centre for Computer Science, Finland has a new website, including publications, projects, software, etc. The link is http://combio.abo.fi/
  • January 15, 2006 - PhD scholarship available at the University of Nottingham, UK: a PhD scholarship is available at the University of Nottingham, under the supervision of Dr. N. Krasnogor. The project concerns the use of P-systems to model abiotic cells. TODO LINK [FILESVARI/PhDAdvertNottingham.pdf Click here for further details.]
  • January 15, 2006 - CALL FOR PAPERS Elsevier's Biosystems: special issue: Membrane Computing applications in Systems Biology, Miguel Camara, Marian Gheorghe, Natalio Krasnogor (Eds.). See details at: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nxk/cfppsystems.pdf
    Important dates:
    • 31st March : papers submission
    • 30th June : review reports
    • 31st August : camera ready format
  • November 30, 2005: A new subject recently arises in the area of P systems, which could be of high interest for the P community: spiking neural P systems. Two downloadable papers are available on the subject:
    • [download/spiktrainf.pdf M. Ionescu, Gh. Paun, T. Yokomori, Spiking neural-like P systems] TODO: LINK
    • [download/spiktrainf.pdf Gh. Paun, M.J. Perez-Jimenez, G. Rozenberg, Spike trains in spiking neural P systems] TODO: LINK
  • October 25, 2005: A paper by Oscar H. Ibarra and Gh. Paun shows a characterization of Context Sensitive languages (and other language classes) in terms symport/antiport P systems. The paper is available in the TODO: LINK[papers.html "download papers" page.]
  • January 20, 2005: A new list of Open Problem in Membrane Computing by Gheorghe Paun is available. [problems.html See the Open Problems page.]TODO: LINK
  • October 21, 2004: The M/2 P Prize has been assigned! [prizes.html See details in the P prizes page.]TODO: LINK
  • October 21, 2004: Recent result confirms the power of P systems with symport/antiport. In a recent paper, (Gh. Paun, J. Pazos, M.J. Perez-Jimenez, A. Rodriguez-Paton, Symport/antiport P systems with three objects are universal) it has been shown that P system with symport/antiport with a only three objects (and four membranes) can simulate any counter machine and, hence, such systems are universal. Systems with two objects can simulate blind counter machines. The paper is available in the [papers.html Download Paper Page].TODO: LINK
  • October 1, 2004: Daniela Besozzi's Phd thesis "Computational and modelling power of P systems"has been prized by the Italian Chapter of EATCS: The PhD thesis of Daniela Besozzi (Universita' di Milano, Italy) has been prized by the Italian Chapter of the EATCS as one of the two best italian PhD theses in Computer Science for the last year. Congratulations to Daniela for her work!
  • September 28, 2004: A paper by Oscar H. Ibarra solves deterministic versus nondeterministic problem in P Systems
    A new paper by Oscar H. Ibarra solves the deterministic versus nondeterministic P systems problem, in two rather interesting cases/modes. The paper can be downloaded in the [papers.html "download papers" page.]TODO: LINK
  • May 11, 2004: PhD and PostDoc positions in Biocomputing at Turku Centre for Computer Science
    A PhD and a postdoc position in Biocomputing are available at Turku Centre for Computer Science (http://www.tucs.fi) in the Department of Computer Science, Abo Akademi University (http://www.cs.abo.fi). The positions, under the supervision of Dr. Ion Petre (http://ww.abo.fi/~ipetre) TODO:LINK tilde are in the project "Computational processes in living organisms" funded by Academy of Finland for the period 2004-2007. The PhD position is for a period of 3 years, starting in September 2004. The postdoc position is for one year, starting in September 2004, and it can be extended for an additional year by mutual consent. The subject proposed concerns genome rearrangements and gene assembly in ciliates (http://users.utu.fi/harju/tohtml.htm). The candidates must have a solid track record in discrete mathematics or algorithmics with a strong interest in (but not necessarily any previous knowledge of) biological issues. The candidate must have successfuly concluded, or be concluding before July 2004 a degree (Master for the PhD candidate, PhD for the postdoc candidate), preferably in mathematics or computer science. No knowledge of Finnish or Swedish is required.
    The interested candidate should send an email to ion.petre@abo.fi with a CV and a letter of intentions. The complete applications must be sent to TUCS (check http://ww.tucs.fi for all requirements), arriving there no later than May 15, 2004.
  • February 10, 2004: About the discovery of the first protein channel for water transportation across membranes
    A new link concerning the discovery of the first protein channel for water transportation across membranes has been added to the links page. The web address is: http://www.ad-astra.ro/benga/
    The link contains useful information for people interested in membrane computing.
  • January 26, 2004: New forum on Membrane Computing.
    The research group on Natural Computing of the University of Sevilla (Spain) opened a new Internet Forum on P systems. The forum is expected to be a useful place to circulate ideas, proposals, partial solutions, draft papers, scientific and organisatorical ideas concerning Membrane Computing. The web address is the following: http://www.cs.us.es/gcn/foro.htm