Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

WENDY: Workshop on Emergent Algorithms and Network Dynamics

GANG/Inria Paris was the institutional organizer of WENDY workshop at Institut Henri-Poincaré, Paris, October 10-11, 2018, https://wendy.paris (chair: Adrian Kosowski).

The goal of the project was to facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers working on distributed computing theory, modeling random structures, and discrete dynamical systems.

The main theme of the workshop was programming local interaction dynamics on networks, so as to obtain the desired emergent effects on the system as a whole. Central topics included:

• Evolving graph models and dynamics on random graphs

• Bio-inspired computing and computing with biological agents

• Chemical reaction networks

• Markovian and non-Markovian processes on networks.

BDA: Workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms

Amos Korman chaired the organizing committee and co-chaired the program committee of the 6th workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms (BDA, http://www.snl.salk.edu/~navlakha/BDA2018/), co-located with ACM PODC in London on July 23rd, 2018.

BDA was focused on the relationships between distributed computing and distributed biological systems and in particular, on analysis and case studies that combine the two. Such research can lead to better understanding of the behavior of the biological systems while at the same time developing novel algorithms that can be used to solve basic distributed computing problems.

The workshop featured 6 invited talks and over a dozen accepted contributed submissions, with generous financial support offered to participants by Amos Korman's ERC grant.