International Workshop on Statistical-Mechanical Informatics 2009 (IW-SMI 2009)

Abstract

Statistical mechanical informatics (SMI) is an approach that applies statistical-mechanics techniques developed for many-body problems in natural science to information sciences. SMI has been extensively applied to various research fields of information sciences, including in particular information and communication theory, probabilistic inference, and combinatorial optimization problems, and has brought about novel advances in these fields. From a formal point of view, the most significant advantage of the SMI approach would be that it facilitates our look at hierarchical organization of a complex system, on the basis of which reduction of many `microscopic' degrees of freedom is performed to obtain a `macroscopic' description of the system with a small number of parameters, which is in turn utilized to analyze the system microscopically. Hierarchy, reduction, and macroscopic description should also be essential in order to understand biological systems. These observations imply that the conceptual framework of SMI should be extensible to various research fields in bioinformatics, and new theoretical frameworks for bioinformatics will be established from the system science viewpoint. To advance research activities in these directions, however, interactions between SMI and bioinformatics are needed.The International Workshop on Statistical-Mechanical Informatics has been organized in order to explore such new directions for SMI and bioinformatics through interactions between various research disciplines, and to incubate joint research initiatives. This workshop, held at Mielparque-Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan, 13–16 September 2009, and sponsored by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas `Deepening and Expansion of Statistical Mechanical Informatics (DEX-SMI)' (Head investigator: Yoshiyuki Kabashima, Tokyo Institute of Technology) (Project http://dex-smi.sp.dis.titech.ac.jp/DEX-SMI), was intended to provide leading researchers in the fields of DNA microarray analysis, brain science, medical engineering and mathematical biology, to exchange advanced findings on and to detail achievements in bioinformatics and statistical mechanics.We would like to thank the contributors of the workshop as well as all the participants, who have enjoyed the workshop as well as their stay in Kyoto. This successful workshop will stimulate further development of the interdisciplinary research field of bioinformatics and SMI. Editors Masato Inoue Shin Ishii Yoshiyuki Kabashima Masato Okada The IW-SMI 2009 Organizing Committee Masato Okada, General Chair (University of Tokyo) Yoshiyuki Kabashima, Vice-General Chair (Tokyo Institute of Technology) Shin Ishii, Program Chair (Kyoto University) Masato Inoue, Publications Chair (Waseda University) Kazuyuki Tanaka (Tohoku University) Toshiyuki Tanaka (Kyoto University)