Related papers: How biochemical resources determine fundamental li…
Accurate information processing is crucial both in technology and in nature. To achieve it, any information processing system needs an initial supply of resources away from thermal equilibrium. Here we establish a fundamental limit on the…
In robotic systems, perception latency is a term that refers to the computing time measured from the data acquisition to the moment in which perception output is ready to be used to compute control commands. There is a compromise between…
The ability to monitor nutrient and other environmental conditions with high sensitivity is crucial for cell growth and survival. Sensory adaptation allows a cell to recover its sensitivity after a transient response to a shift in the…
Living cells are continually exposed to environmental signals that vary in time. These signals are detected and processed by biochemical networks, which are often highly stochastic. To understand how cells cope with a fluctuating…
One of the primary computational requirements of a cellular system is the ability to transfer information between spatially separated components. To accomplish this, biology uses diverse physical channels including production or release of…
Maximizing the speed and precision of communication while minimizing power dissipation is a fundamental engineering design goal. Also, biological systems achieve remarkable speed, precision and power efficiency using poorly understood…
Sensing is the process of deriving signals from the environment that allows artificial systems to interact with the physical world. The Shannon theorem specifies the maximum rate at which information can be acquired. However, this upper…
Living cells can enhance their fitness by anticipating environmental change. We study how accurately linear signaling networks in cells can predict future signals. We find that maximal predictive power results from a combination of…
Cells continuously sense their surroundings to detect modifications and generate responses. Very often changes in extracellular concentrations initiate signaling cascades that eventually result in changes in gene expression. Increasing…
Living cells sense their environment through the binding of extra-cellular molecular ligands to cell surface receptors. Puzzlingly, vast numbers of signaling pathways exhibit a high degree of cross talk between different signals whereby…
We typically think of cells as responding to external signals independently by regulating their gene expression levels, yet they often locally exchange information and coordinate. Can such spatial coupling be of benefit for conveying…
Cells can utilize chemical communication to exchange information and coordinate their behavior in the presence of noise. Communication can reduce noise to shape a collective response, or amplify noise to generate distinct phenotypic…
We consider a basic communication and sensing setup comprising a transmitter, a receiver and a sensor. The transmitter sends an encoded sequence to the receiver through a discrete memoryless channel, and the receiver is interested in…
In this paper we prove the existence of a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and robustness in perception-based control, where control decisions rely solely on data-driven, and often incompletely trained, perception maps. In particular,…
In many developmental systems, cells differentiate into a tissue by reading out morphogen concentration fields, a process fundamentally limited by noise. How much can the precision of this process be improved by nonlocal information, e.g.,…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
Speciation is driven by many different factors. Among those are trade-offs between different ways an organism utilizes resources, and these trade-offs can constrain the manner in which selection can optimize traits. Limited migration among…
Access to resources strongly constrains the decisions we make. While we might wish to offer every student a scholarship, or schedule every patient for follow-up meetings with a specialist, limited resources mean that this is not possible.…
We investigate the dynamics of two models of biological networks with purely suppressive interactions between the units; species interacting via niche competition and neurons via inhibitory synaptic coupling. In both of these cases,…
The deterministic capacity of a relay network is the capacity of a network when relays are restricted to transmitting \emph{reliable} information, that is, (asymptotically) deterministic function of the source message. In this paper it is…