Keynote Speaker - Neil Gershenfeld

We are pleased to announce our newest confirmed keynote speaker, Professor Neil Gershenfeld. NEIL GERSHENFELD is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. His unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from creating molecular quantum computers to virtuosic musical instruments. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House and the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows and Sami herds.

He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, and the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice and by Prospect/FP as one of the top 100 public intellectuals.
Dr. Gershenfeld has a BA in Physics with High Honors and an honorary Doctor of Science from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. from Cornell University, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs.

His keynote title and abstract information will be released shortly.

See http://www.nanonets.org/keynote.shtml for more information on our keynotes.

~Damira (Nano-Net Webmaster)

Call for Papers DEADLINE EXTENDED!

The Call For Papers Deadline has been EXTENDED from May 15, 2008 to June 15, 2008 to allow for additional submissions. Please see http://www.nanonets.org/cfp.shtml for additional details as well as a .doc and plain text version of the CFP. We ask all Technical Program Committee members to advertise the Call For Papers with the new deadline once it is finalized.

~Damira (Nano-Net 2008 Webmaster)

Keynote Tatsuya Suda Presentation Title and Abstract Now Up

Keynote speaker Tatsuya Suda's presentation title and abstract are now available at: http://www.nanonets.org/keynote.shtml.

Molecular Communication: A New Paradigm for Communication Among Biological Nanomachines

Molecular communication is a new paradigm for nano-scale communication between biological or artificial nanomachines (artificial or biological nano-scale devices that perform simple computation, sensing, or actuation). Molecular communication applies the nano and micro-scale communication mechanisms from biological systems to allow nanomachines to communicate by using molecules as a communication carrier over a short distance.

Nanomachines that communicate may achieve tasks that cannot be accomplished by a single nanomachine and can spur the creation of entirely new applications. Such applications may include distributed computing through communicating nanomachines that function as basic logic gates and human health monitoring through communicating nanomachines that act as implant devices monitoring molecules and conditions in a human body.

The class of molecular communication systems considered in this presentation consists of sender nanomachines, receiver nanomachines, carrier molecules, and the environment that these operate in. Senders and receivers include biological (such as cells) and biologically derived (such as molecular motors or sensors taken from biological systems) nanomachines that are capable of emitting and capturing carrier molecules (such as proteins, ions, or DNA). The environment is the aqueous solution that is typically found within and between cells.

This presentation explains initial ideas for molecular communication. This presentation also covers basic communication processes in molecular communication and key system components that form a molecular communication system. It also illustrates research issues necessary to create molecular communication.

Yaakov (Kobi) Benenson - new TPC member

We are pleased to announce another TPC member, Yaakov (Kobi) Benenson from Harvard. He has a Ph.D. from the Departments of Computer Science & Applied Mathematics and Biological Chemistry of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He is involved in the Laboratory for Molecular Automata and the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University. He is currently the Principal Investigator for a grant titled: "Synthetic implementation of biological control modules" and participates as a program committee member in several conferences including the International Meeting on DNA-Based Computers and the
International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems.