Computer science colloquia: Jack Lutz
| Date/Time: | Thursday, 30 Sep 2010 at 3:40 pm |
|---|---|
| Location: | B29 Atanasoff |
| Cost: | Free |
| Phone: | 515-294-6516 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Categories: | Lectures |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
DNA nanotechnology, pioneered by Seeman in the 1980s, is a promising approach to engineering structures that autonomously assemble themselves from molecular components. These structures, which may be complex and aperiodic, can be programmed, in the sense that they are determined by a designer's selection of the finite set of molecular (DNA) component types from which the structures self-assemble. The structures may also be dynamic, with various types of molecular robots performing specified tasks at the nanoscale. Many of the leaders in DNA nanotechnology are computer scientists, and this will be even more true in the future. This is because the methods that computer scientists have developed for creating, controlling, and reasoning about hardware, software, and networks of immense complexity will be essential in dealing with the far more complex molecular tasks and environments (e.g., human cells) that nanotechnology will confront.
This talk will survey recent work in this area, including research by computer science faculty and graduate students at Iowa State. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the contributions that various areas of computer science (programming languages, software engineering, robotics, networks, distributed systems, theory, ...) will make to nanotechnology in the coming years.
Lutz completed his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1987. He then joined the faculty at Iowa State, where he has been a professor of computer science since 1996. He has also held one-semester positions as a DIMACS Visiting Fellow at Rutgers University (1990), a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University (1997), a Visiting Scientist at NEC Research Institute (2001) and a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (2006). His research interests are in computational complexity, algorithmic information and randomness, computability and complexity in analysis, and molecular programming and self-assembly.