MS04 - OTHE-01
Information theory, fitness, and semantics in biological information processing
Tuesday, July 15 at 3:50pm

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.
Massimiliano Pierobon
University of Nebraska-Lincoln"On the Usefulness and Subjectivity of Life-supporting Information"
Alexander Moffett
Northeastern University"Evolution of Environmental Sensing"
Andrew Eckford
York University"Kelly Bets and Single-Letter Codes: Optimal Information Processing in Natural Systems"
Peter Thomas
Case Western Reserve University"Tradeoffs in the energetic value of neuromodulation in a closed-loop neuromechanical system"
