What is Life Numerics? One way to look at it is as a synonym of Computational Biology. Biology is a very broad term denoting the study of life and living organizms. The word computational, on the other hand, indicates that the study is to be performed by means of computing. According to Wikipedia, Computational Biology uses methods from Mathematics and Computer Science to develop techniques to model or simulate biological processes. It also includes fields like Bioinformatics or Computational Genomics, which use mathematical methods to analyze and interpret the experimental data obtained from biological systems. Life Numerics is somewhat wider: we are interested not only in the manner, by which living systems are studied, but also in the very processes in the system that can be viewed as computing.
The goal of Life Numerics is twofold. The first goal is to review and understand which trends in the modern computing technology became, or are likely to become, the most important for the advancement of our understanding of life. Bioinformatics and medical imaging are two of the most popular areas of modern Biology, which are already heavily dependent on using computing power. These fields are widely publicized and made their way into practical applications. There are others, such as bio-modeling, molecular modeling, prediction of protein structure and protein-protein interactions, systems biology, or even molecular dynamics. They also use computation as the discovery tool, but are more technical and specialized to be popular. It is likely that these areas are yet to be advanced pending further development of computing technology.
Another goal is to observe and emphasize the act of computation, which happens and plays an important role in life. For example, a groundbreaking discovery of the process of development of drosofila egg illustrates the importance of computation in the early stage of development of embryo. A more complicated example is recognition of speech or patterns performed by a live brain.
Life Numerics is expected to be an informational resource, less formal than a scientific publication, but sufficiently deep and accurate.
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Life Numerics is a place to discuss anything concerned the interplay of the modern computer technology and our understanding of living processes: computational modeling and genomics, modeling of molecules and processing of medical images, analysis of neuroscience data and visualizing brain structure, as well as new computational paradigms inspired by live systems.
