Information theory, fitness, and semantics in biological information processing

Organizers:

Andrew Eckford (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, York University, Toronto)

Description:

Shannon's information theory has been used to describe the gain of evolutionary fitness that an organism obtains from sensing and processing environmental information. However, the semantics of the information are important to the organism - for example, the presence of predators, or nutrients, are more important to the organism than other sensory details. Moreover, organisms sense and act, and their actions affect the sensing task. It is an important open question how to incorporate meaning and action into the Shannon information framework. This mini-symposium will consider recent results at the intersection of fitness, semantics, and information theory, and to facilitate discussion and future research on this important topic. A breakthrough in this direction would provide quantitative methods for predicting the behaviour of organisms and for understanding biological information processing. Moreover, while this mini-symposium focuses on biology, similar questions are presently being investigated in the mainstream information theory community, indicating the timeliness of this topic.

Diversity Statement:

There was a problem with the submission form and we lost the diversity statement [Jay]