Summary of the Workshop on Natural Computing and Graph Transformations

Abstract

This is the proceedings of the Workshop on “Natural Computing and Graph Transformations”, organized in Leicester, UK, on September 8, 2008. The workshop is a satellite event of the “International Conference on Graph Transformations 2008” conference organized in Leicester. Natural Computing is a research area concerned with computing taking place in nature and with human-designed computing inspired by nature. It is a fast growing, genuinely interdisciplinary field involving, among others, biology, mathematics and computer science. Graphs and graph transformations are of great interest in this field in several respects. On the one hand, graphs are often used in the modeling of natural processes either as a representation of the hierarchical structures involved in the process or as a way to formalize the features of reality on several levels of abstraction. Several graph related formalisms such as Petri nets, abstract state machines, automata, membrane systems, mobile ambients, etc., are already used as modeling tools for natural processes. On the other hand, in human-designed computing inspired by nature, graph theoretical formulations and problems are often used as benchmarks for the investigation of the potential of the proposed computational paradigms. The programof the workshop consists of five invited lectures by Dr. Robert Brijder (University of Leiden, the Netherlands), Professor Tero Harju (University of Turku, Finland), Professor Ina Koch (Technical University of Applied Sciences and MPI for Molecular Genetics, Germany), Dr. Andrei Paun (Latech, USA, INCDSB, Romania and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain), Professor Reiko Heckel (University of Leicester, UK), as well as four contributed papers. The scientific program of the workshop spans an interesting mix of topics, ranging from self-assembly of graphs to applications of graph transformations to gene assembly, from petri nets to state machines, from deterministic to nondeterministic modeling in systems biology, from applications of membrane computing in cryptography to computing inspired by biology. We thank all the authors for contributing to this most interesting meeting.