Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Systems research group

The mission of ICOS is to derive new knowledge and provide innovative solutions to problems arising in natural complex systems (e.g. in biology, chemistry, physics) and man-made ones (e.g. socio-technical organisations, infrastructure in healthcare, logistics, etc). To accomplish its mission, the group leverages its interdisciplinary expertise in advanced information processing (e.g. image analysis, machine learning, data mining), process modelling (e.g. optimisation under uncertainty), and high-performance computation (e.g. distributed, cloud and GPU computing).

ICOS research areas

Bioinformatics, Systems and Synthetic Biology

Our work in this area includes sophisticated search based methodologies for protein structure prediction, ensemble methods for comparing large protein datasets and data mining genes, signalling and metabolic networks. We also work on modelling techniques for organ development (e.g. plants’ roots) and cellular collectives (e.g. bacterial biofilms).

Information Processing in Complex Systems

We investigate unconventional computation paradigms as they occur in nature and we develop new computational substrates (e.g. molecular computation, biological cells-based computation, etc). We are interested in the dynamics of complex systems and how by understanding their computational capabilities one could ultimately be able to control them.

Machine Intelligence

We carry out research at the leading edge of algorithms design with the goal of enabling computers to deal, autonomously, with extremely hard problems. For this purpose we have developed techniques in data abstraction and granular computing, computer vision, optimisation, data mining and machine learning and we have applied these to a large number of real world problems.