Department of Informatics FCT NOVA - NOVA LINCS Distinguished Lecture 2016

Professor Luca Cardelli, of Oxford University and Microsoft Research, was the speaker of Dintinguished Lecture 2016, organized by the Department of Informatics and the NEW LINCS, under the theme "Telling Molecules What To Do".

Digital computers allow us to manipulate information systematically, leading to recent advances in our ability to structure our society and to communicate in richer ways. They also allow us to orchestrate physical forces, transforming and optimizing our manufacturing processes. What they cannot do very well, is to interact directly with biological organisms or in general orchestrate molecular arrangements. Thanks to biotechnology, nucleic acids (DNA/RNA) are particularly effective 'user-programmable' entities at the molecular scale. They can be directed to assemble nano-scale structures, to produce physical forces, to act as sensors and actuators, and to do general computation in between. We will be able to interface them with biological machinery to detect and cure diseases at the cellular level under program control. The theory of computability directed the design of digital computers, and it can now inform the development of new computational fabrics, at the molecular level, that will eventually give us control of an entirely new domain of reality.

Luca Cardelli is a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Edinburgh. He worked at Bell Labs (1982-1985), and Systems Research Center (SRC) of the Digital Equipment Corporation (1985-1997), before joining Microsoft Research (Cambridge Lab). Since 2014 is Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University. It is also a member of the Royal Society, Association for Computing Machinery, Academia Europaea, and the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets.