Related papers: Information theory and adaptation
In this final chapter, we consider the state-of-the-art for spreading in social systems and discuss the future of the field. As part of this reflection, we identify a set of key challenges ahead. The challenges include the following…
It is widely believed that the perceptual system of an organism is optimized for the properties of the environment to which it is exposed. A specific instance of this principle known as the Infomax principle holds that the purpose of early…
We describe some applications of quantum information theory to the analysis of quantum limits on measurement sensitivity. A measurement of a weak force acting on a quantum system is a determination of a classical parameter appearing in the…
As a result of the capabilities of quantum information, the science of quantum information processing is now a prospering, interdisciplinary field focused on better understanding the possibilities and limitations of the underlying theory,…
Living systems often function with regulatory interactions, but the question of how activity, stochasticity and regulations work together for achieving different goals still remains puzzling. We propose a stochastic model of an active…
In computational biology and other sciences, researchers are frequently faced with a choice between several computational methods for performing data analyses. Benchmarking studies aim to rigorously compare the performance of different…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
It is a challenge to predict the response of a large, complex system to a perturbation. Recent attempts to predict the behaviour of food webs have revealed that the effort needed to understand a system grows quickly with its complexity,…
In the theoretical modelling of a physical system a crucial step consists in the identification of those degrees of freedom that enable a synthetic, yet informative representation of it. While in some cases this selection can be carried out…
Theory and empirical science should be in constant dialogue, but often find it hard to understand one another. Here we describe a graduate-level university course we developed to improve matters. The course was designed to help…
Biology is data-rich, and it is equally rich in concepts and hypotheses. Part of trying to understand biological processes and systems is therefore to confront our ideas and hypotheses with data using statistical methods to determine the…
The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative behavioural definition of computation (and of a computer) based simply on whether a system is capable of reacting to the environment-the input-as reflected in a measure of programmability.…
Statistical properties of environments experienced by biological signaling systems in the real world change, which necessitate adaptive responses to achieve high fidelity information transmission. One form of such adaptive response is gain…
Energy efficiency is closely related to the evolution of biological systems and is important to their information processing. In this paper, we calculated the excitation probability of a simple model of a bistable biological unit in…
The informational synthesis of neural structures, processes, parameters and characteristics that allow a unified description and modeling as neural machines of natural and artificial neural systems is presented. The general informational…
A general notion of information-related complexity applicable to both natural and man-made systems is proposed. The overall approach is to explicitly consider a rational agent performing a certain task with a quantifiable degree of success.…
Resource-constrained systems are prevalent in communications. Such a system is composed of many components but only some of them can be allocated with resources such as time slots. According to the amount of information about the system,…
Robotics has dramatically increased our ability to gather data about our environments, creating an opportunity for the robotics and algorithms communities to collaborate on novel solutions to environmental monitoring problems. To understand…