Intelligent software ‘thinks’ like a biologist
Researchers from Harvard Medical School have developed Little b, a new computer language that can ‘think’ in the same way as cells and molecular mechanisms, offering the potential for researchers to discover particulars of, for example, drug interactions on the computer desktop.
Most computational methods of modelling biological systems are not unlike writing a document with a pen and paper. Each new project starts from scratch; there are no facilities for cutting and pasting, for linking to other texts, for including images, etc – things that come so ‘naturally’ to electronic documents.
Harvard Medical School researcher Jeremy Gunawardena, a trained mathematician, teamed up with cell biologist and computer scientist Aneil Mallavarapu to eliminate these limitations.
Modularity involves breaking a problem down into separate modules and constructing each module so that it can interact with the others. Abstraction refers to extracting genetic biological properties and incorporating them into the modules, so that they can use this abstract information in concrete contexts. Put another way, abstraction means that, unlike the old days of pen and paper, each new model does not need to be built from scratch. Models can be built upon each other and their individual models refined and re-used.
To do this, Mallavarapu used the LISP programming language, widely used in artificial intelligence research. LISP is unique for it’s ability to write code, which in turn can write code, enabling programmers to derive new mini languages.
Guanwardena, explained: “LISP isn’t like typical programs, it’s more like a conversation. When we input data into Little b, Little b responds to it and reasons over the data.”
He continued: “Through incorporating principles of engineering, we’ve developed a language that can describe biology in the same way a biologist would. The potential here is enormous. This opens the door to actually performing discovery science, to look at things like drug interactions, right on the computer.”
Read more on: artificial intelligence, Bio Tech, cells, computer, Design
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