Proceedings Second International Workshop on Hybrid Systems and Biology

Abstract

This volume contains the proceedings of the Second International Workshop Hybrid Systems and Biology (HSB 2013) held in Taormina (Italy), on September 2th, 2013. The workshop is affiliated to the 12th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2013). Systems biology aims at providing a system-level understanding of biological systems by unveiling their structure, dynamics and control methods. Due to the intrinsic multi-scale nature of these systems in space, in organization levels and in time, it is extremely difficult to model them in a uniform way, e.g., by means of differential equations or discrete stochastic processes. Furthermore, such models are often not easily amenable to formal analysis, and their simulations at the organ or even at the cell levels are frequently impractical. Indeed, an important open problem is finding appropriate computational models that scale well for both simulation and formal analysis of biological processes. Hybrid modeling techniques, combining discrete and continuous processes, are gaining more and more attention in such a context, and they have been successfully applied to capture the behavior of many biological complex systems, ranging from genetic networks, biochemical reactions, signaling pathways, cardiac tissues electro-physiology, and tumor genesis. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers in computer science, mathematics, and life sciences, interested in the opportunities and the challenges of hybrid modeling applied to systems biology. The workshop programme included the keynote presentation of Alessandro Astolfi (Imperial College of London, UK) on Immune response enhancement via hybrid control. Furthermore, 8 papers were selected out of 13 submissions by the Program Committee of HSB 2013. The papers in this volume address the hybrid modeling of a number important biological processes (iron homeostasis network, mammalian cell cycle, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), genetic regulatory network in mammalian sclera) and, the formalisms and techniques for specifying and validating properties of biological systems (such as, robustness, oscillations).