TOPIC	Multi-scale modeling of HIV dynamics using a Grid-based System-level approach
SPEAKER	Peter Sloot Visiting Professor School of Computer Engineering Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
DATE	20 Jan 2009
TIME	10:30am
VENUE	LT10, NTU
FEES	Free Admission

ABSTRACT

Recent advances in experimental techniques such as detectors, sensors, and scanners have opened up new windows into physical and biological and man-made processes on many levels of detail. The complete cascade from the individual components to the fully integrated multi-science systems crosses many orders of magnitude in temporal and spatial scales. The challenge is to study not only the fundamental processes on all these separate scales, but also their mutual coupling through the scales in the overall system, and the resulting emergent properties. These complex systems display endless signatures of order, disorder, self-organization and self-annihilation. Understanding, quantifying and handling this information complexity is one of the biggest scientific challenges of our time. Prof. Sloot will present recent work on understanding the dynamics of drug resistant HIV from the molecule all the way up to the population in order to facilitate prediction, prevention, and optimal measures such as optimal drug administration. The simulation and context sensitive text-mining are integrated into a multiscale grid-based distributed decision support system named 'Virolab' virtual laboratory. In this lecture, Prof. Sloot will also discuss the biomedical challenges, the computational approach and the virtual laboratory.

BIOGRAPHY

Prof. Peter M.A. Sloot studied chemistry and physics, finished his Computational BioPhysics PhD work at the Dutch Cancer institute (NKI) in 1988 with Prof. Carl Figdor and did various postdocs abroad. In 1996 he was awarded the prestigious chair in Numerical Physics from the Dutch Physics Society and since 2001 he is a full professor in Computational Sciences at the Faculty of Science of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In his research, he focuses on the theory and application of complex systems through distributed mesoscopic computer simulation; trying to understand how information progresses through various spatial and temporal scales. He is strongly interested in applying his idea’s to BioMedical systems. Internationally he is a strong advocate of the field of Computational Science: he has been the General Chair of the ICCS series of conferences on Computational Sciences since 2002 and director of the related MSc program. Up to 2007 he has co-edited with Prof. Jack Dongarra over 20,000 peer reviewed pages of research from this conference series in Springer’s LNCS. He is an external advisor to the UK eScience Strategic Advisory Team and Editor in Chief of the Elsevier’s science journal: Future Generation of Computing Systems as well as Associate editor of The International Transactions on Systems Science and Applications. The average number of keynotes and invited lectures over the past 5 years were 8 per year; this in addition to public lectures and interviews. Over the past decade he acquired funding for 9 NWO (NSF) and KNAW (Academy of Science) projects and 8 large EU projects. Currently he leads the EU ViroLab project (www.virolab.org) and participate in 4 more EU projects and 5 NWO projects. Peter Sloot has over 320 peer reviewed publications, among which ~ 70 as the 1st author, 77 ISI registered peer-reviewed journal papers, 180 proceeding papers and 10 chapters in books. He owns the IPR of 2 Patents and Trademarks and supervise(d) 18 PhD theses. More information: http://www.science.uva.nl/~sloot