College Events

International Symposium CAUMME 2012: Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Global Impacts and Local Challenges

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EE Department in the Media-Al Raya Newspaper (Arabic)  

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Cells are generally viewed as highly complex and inappropriate media for human engineering. However, with advances in molecular biology, it is now possible to design, simulate, build and test artificial networks of genes.

These networks (commonly called Gene Regulatory Networks or GRNs) are added to the native genome of some organism (most often E. Coli) in order to introduce new, possibly computational, behaviors. This talk presents a selective survey of the new and rapidly growing sub-field of computational synthetic biology. Principle mechanisms, a number of critical devices as well as more sophisticated systems are explained in brief. Our own ongoing work is described. Future challenges are also discussed, only in outline.

Dr. Nawwaf Kharma got his B.Eng. degree in Computer Engineering from The City University, London, receiving the Jarogate Prize for best overall academic performance. He got his PhD in Machine Learning form Imperial College, London. Since joining Concordia University in 2000, he has co-authored and authored a textbook on Character Recognition and a chapter on Evolvable Developmental Systems. He has published more than 25 peer-reviewed articles. He has two Canadian software copyrights. Kharma has received a Human-Competitive award from the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2006 for his  work on multiple ellipse detection (in microscopic images) using multi-population genetic algorithms. He is now leading a small team developing that work into a software prototype, in a 1-year project funded by NSERC's Idea to Innovation (I2I) programme. He heads the Computational Intelligence Lab at the Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept. of Concordia University.