Biology 2016 - AI for Synthetic Biology Workshop

Our primary goal in this workshop is to draw the attention of the AI community to a novel and rich application domain, namely Synthetic Biology. Synthetic biology is the systematic design and engineering of biological systems. Synthetic organisms are currently designed at the DNA level, which limits the complexity of the systems. In this workshop we will have invited speakers introducing the domain, and describing the current workflow used by synthetic biologists. We will identify open problems and challenges in the Synthetic Biology and AI intersection through discussions and demonstrate the feasibility of progress through contributed talks.
Synthetic Biology holds the potential for revolutionary advances in medicine, environmental remediation, and many more. For example, some synthetic biologists are trying to develop cellular programs that will identify and kill cancer cells, while others are trying to design plants that will extract harmful pollutants like arsenic from the ground. However, the field has reached a complexity barrier that AI researchers can help it overcome. The state-of-the-art techniques in synthetic biology require practitioners to design organisms at the DNA level. This low-level, manual process becomes unmanageable as the size of design grows. This is analogous to writing a computer program in assembly language, which also becomes difficult quickly as the size of the program grows.
We believe that the time is ripe to gather researchers from synthetic biology and AI communities to cultivate a multi-disciplinary research community that can benefit both areas. For AI researchers it will be a never before explored novel domain with unique challenges, whereas for the synthetic biology community it will be an opportunity to break the complexity barrier it is facing.