BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Memento EPFL// BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Ultra Energy Efficient Systems in Biology\, Engineering\, and Medi cine DTSTART:20131001T160000 DTSTAMP:20260510T164713Z UID:379d01bf8f95d65ba9bbdb4ecbb8b88542593fac9d68bc11bdc3a926 CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars DESCRIPTION:Prof. Rahul Sarpeshkar\, MIT\nBio: Rahul Sarpeshkar is a tenur ed professor at MIT where he heads a research group on Analog Circuits and Biological Systems (http://www.rle.mit.edu/acbs/). His bioengineering gro up creates novel wet DNA-protein circuits in living cells and also advance d dry nanoelectronic circuits on silicon chips. His longstanding work on a nalog and biological computation and his recent work in NATURE (May 2013) have helped pioneer the field of analog synthetic biology. His work on a g lucose fuel cell for medical implants was featured by Scientific American among 2012's 10 World Changing Ideas and also by the BBC\, Economist\, and Science News. He was an invited speaker at the 2011 Frontiers of Engineer ing Conference\, hosted by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).\nHe holds over 30 patents and has authored more than 120 publications\, includ ing one that was featured on the cover of Nature. His recent book\, Ultra Low Power Bioelectronics: Fundamentals\, Biomedical Applications\, and Bio -inspired Systems contains a broad and deep treatment of ultra energy effi cient systems in biology\, engineering\, and medicine with applications to implantable medical devices for the deaf\, blind\, and paralyzed. His gro up holds several first or best world records in analog\, bio-inspired\, sy nthetic biology\, medical device\, ultra low power\, and energy harvesting systems. He has received several awards including the NSF Career Award\, the ONR Young Investigator Award\, and the Packard Fellows Award. He recei ved Bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics at MIT and a PhD at CalTech. Before he joined MIT’s faculty\, he was a member of th e technical staff of Bell Labs’ division of biological computation.\nMot her Nature is a great analog and digital circuit designer. She has innovat ed circuits in the biochemical\, biomechanical\, and bioelectronic domains that operate robustly with highly noisy and imprecise parts and with incr edibly low levels of energy. Her impressive accomplishment is largely due to the fact that she uses both analog (graded) and digital (all-or-none) c ircuits within her cells to sense\, actuate\, compute\, and communicate. A nalog and bio-inspired approaches that mimic nature can also create ultra- energy-efficient systems: For example\, we were recently able to show how brain implants for the paralyzed could be powered from a novel glucose fue l cell that harvests energy from bodily fluids. In this talk\, I shall dis cuss how a positive-feedback loop between analog circuits and cell biology may enable similar synergistic improvements in synthetic and systems biol ogy.\nThe deep connection between analog circuits and cell biology arises because there are astounding similarities between the equations that descr ibe noisy electronic flow in sub-threshold transistors and the equations t hat describe noisy molecular flow in chemical reactions\, both of which ob ey the laws of exponential thermodynamics. Based on these similarities\, w e have engineered logarithmic analog computation in living cells with less than three transcription factors\, almost two orders of magnitude more ef ficient than prior digital approaches.  In addition\, highly computationa lly intensive noisy DNA-protein and protein-protein networks can be rapidl y simulated in mixed-signal supercomputing chips that naturally capture th eir noisiness\, dynamics\, and loading interactions at lightning-fast spee ds. Such an approach may enable large-scale design and analysis in synthet ic and systems biology that is faithful to how messy analog biology works\ , quite different from clean\, well-defined digital design.\nNote that Pro f. Sarpeshkar will also participate in 2 satellite events: he will give a seminar in Neuchâtel and a seminar in Basel at the following times:Octobe r 2nd\, 17:00\n3rd floor CSEM headquarters (Jacquet-Droz 7\, Neuchâtel)Oc tober 4th\, 13:30\nETHZ Basel\, BSSE Building\, room WRO 1058 (Misrock Lec ture Room).\nhttp://www.bsse.ethz.ch/bel/HowtoFindUs/index LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420 STATUS:CONFIRMED END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR