Session 2D: Public Lecture

Chairperson: Raghavan Varadarajan, IISc, Bengaluru

From human-engineered intelligence to re-engineered biology: A journey

Historians of science will note that the last 50 years have marked two interwoven timelines marking great progress in both information and life sciences and their remarkable crossings. The idea of using variational calculus to solve problems of logical inference was anticipated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (the last universal genius) who posited in the late 17th century that Characteristica Universalis and Calculus Ratiocinator represent two intertwined concepts that reflected his vision for a universal framework for reasoning and computation. These ideas gathered great momentum in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with the inexorable, exponential Moore’s law of computer engineering, racing us to an age of intelligent machines. In this period, the life sciences too saw exquisite development of instrumentation and techniques that accelerated understanding of cells, genes, chemical processes and information flows moving the science from the descriptive towards grand ideas about life, organisation and complexity. This talk will describe the speaker’s journey through these timelines and his attempts to thread the crossings with translational intent.