The project has two independent groups that share a common underlying motivation. These are: System Biology Group, and Symbiotic Intelligence Group

Systems Biology group aims at establishment of a new field in biology, “Systems Biology”. Systems Biology aims at system-level understanding of biological systems using the power of computation, analysis based on control theory and dynamical systems, new instrumentation technologies, which tightly coupled with experimental molecular biology. Understanding at system-level means that we can reproduce the system/phenomena on computer simulation or other medium, control their behaviors in the predictive fashion, and design such systems.

As seen in the progress of the human genome project, the completion of DNA sequence of C. elegans in 1998, identification of components for biological systems is making a rapid progress. The use of DNA chip and micro-array made it possible for us to measure, although in a coarse-grain manner, behaviors of each gene in a large scale. In addition, there are numbers of efforts for systematic screening of various mutants for representative model systems.

In the lights of such progress in molecular biology, we believe that time has come to venture into the system-level understanding of biological systems, based on understanding of individual components at molecular-level. In order to accomplish our goal, the initial stage of the project focuses on development of high fidelity simulation systems, large-scale parameter search based on expression and mutant data, hypotheses generation and verification, experimental design deduction, and apply such systems and methodologies for specific biological systems. We chose to investigate E. Coli, Yeast, C. elegans, drosophila, and certain aspects of human cells. In essence, we would like to find a method to “Reverse Engineering Life”.

Symbiotic Intelligence group focuses on high-level cognitive functions, and takes more synthetic approach to understand basic principles of intelligence reformulated in the engineering context. Consider how human learned to fly. Leonard da-Vinci, for example, tries to mimic wings and flipping motion of birds, and failed. The Wright Brothers discovered that the essence of flight is “lift” and “thrust”, and created a fixed wing to generate lift when thrust is applied using an engine. The recent success of the IBM’s Deep Blue that beat human chess champion is decomposition of human intelligent ability during the chess game into memory and search. While the demonstrated success is limited to the chess, it may well be applicable for other highly intelligence tasks which shares essential aspects with chess.

Symbiotic Intelligence group strive to find the underlying principles of intelligence using high degree of freedom robot systems with multiple perception channels, such as vision, auditory, tactile, etc. We consider the integration of multi-modal perceptive inputs combined with motor control to effects the environment and self status is the basic conditions that exhibits intelligence. The concept of streams of multiple perception channels and their association is the other important premises. We have not clearly decomposed that are essence in the engineering reformulation, as identification of such concept is the final goal of the project.