9-10 December 2019
Ilse Katz Institute for Nanscale Science and Technology (Bldg. 51)
The increasingly powerful sequencing techniques of the Human Genome Project and its successors, as well as computing tools and high-throughput technology have pushed biological research forward in a number of ways. They have made systems approaches possible, drastically increased the efficiency of research, and transformed many fields of biology, such as genomics, developmental systems biology, cytology, and microbiology. The fact that the NSF has recognized computational and data-enabled science as a new fundamental "pillar" of science, supplementing theory and experimentation, shows the increasing importance of 'big data' technology in science.
'Big data' technology has been fruitfully integrated into causal-mechanistic research at a systems level, but has also led to data-driven research that does not reach beyond correlation and has been used to support a new "philosophy" that runs counter to conventional epistemologies. While it is true that developments in computer science and engineering have indeed pushed pattern recognition in many fields of science far beyond the ability of humans, science is not confined to pattern recognition. Biology asks causal questions, e.g. about genomic causality of development, and looks for mechanisms needed to understand how intervention, perturbation (or disease) affect a system.
The planned workshop will address the topic from the perspectives of different scientific as well as humanistic specialties. It aims at generating an intellectual discussion about the changing methodology and its implication for scientific knowledge in 21st century informational biology.
Confirmed speakers:
George Brownlee - University of Oxford, UK
Ami Citri - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Ute Deichmann - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Ally Eran - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Douglas Erwin - Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, USA
Denis Forest - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
Dan Graur - University of Houston, USA
Jeremy Gunawardena - Harvard University, USA
Michael Hiller - Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany
Shalev Itzkovitz - Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Ron Milo - Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Ellen Rothenberg - California Institute of Technology, USA
Stanislav Shvartsman - Princeton University, USA
Robert A. Weinberg
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, USA
