Abstract:

This plenary talk starts with a brief introduction to computational models of gene regulatory networks (GRN), followed by a description of our recent results on analyzing and synthesizing gene regulatory motifs,  particularly from the robustness and evolvability perspective. We show that in a feedforward Boolean network, the trade-off between robustness and evolvability cannot be resolved. In contrast, this trade-off can be resolved in an ODE-based GRN model for cellular growth. In addition, we demonstrate that robust GRN motifs can emerge from in silico evolution without an explicit selection pressure on robustness.  Our results also suggest that evolvability is evolvable without an explicit selection pressure.  

In the second part of the talk, we touch upon morphogenetic robotics, which is a new emerging field of developmental robotics that deals with the self-organization, self-reconfiguration and self-adaptive control using genetic and cellular mechanisms governing the biological morphogenesis. We will illustrate how GRN models can be used for self-organizing swarm robotic systems for flexible and robust shape formation and boundary coverage. In a second example, we will present a GRN model developed for self-reconfiguring modular robots to autonomously in a changing environment.

Bio Sketch:

Yaochu Jin received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees, all in automatic control from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1988, 1991, and 1996, respectively, and the Dr.-Ing. Degree from Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany, in 2001.

Dr. Jin is currently a Professor at the Deparment of Computing, University of Surrey, Subject Coordinator, Research Institute for Robotics and Cognition (CoR-Lab), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany, and Visiting Professor, NICAL, The University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. He was a Principal Scientist with the Honda Research Institute Europe, Offenbach, Germany. His research interests include computational approaches to understanding evolution, learning and development in biology, and bio-inspired approaches to complex systems design. His research fields span from artificial life, computational intelligence, to computational systems biology and computational neuroscience. He has (co)edited three books and three conference proceedings, authored a monograph, and (co)authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers.

Dr. Jin is currently an Associate Editor of BioSystems, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. He is also an editorial board member of Soft Computing and Memetic Computing. Dr. Jin is an invited Plenary / Keynote Speaker on several international conferences and workshops. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.