Abstract: "Epidemic dissemination protocols are known to be extremely
scalable and robust. As a result, they are particularly well suited to
support the dissemination of information in large-scale peer-to-peer
systems. In such an environment, nodes do not belong to the same
administrative domain. On the contrary, many of these systems rely on
resources made available by rational nodes that are not necessarily
obedient to the protocol. There are two main incentive mechanisms that
can be used to deal with rational behavior. One is to rely on balanced

Evolutionary algorithms are stochastic optimization techniques based on the
principles of natural evolution and Genetic Programming (GP) belongs to this family .

In recent years the study of GP systems has been extended to phenotypic aspects while in previous phase it was mainly focused on genotypic and syntactic aspects.

Portugal is one the largest producers of pulp derived from Eucalyptus
globulus, making it a fun- damental species for the country. The
selection of adequate genotypes would make the exploitation of
cultivation areas more efficient. A key objective is to understand the
regulatory mechanisms impacting wood characteristics. Here we focus on
microRNA-mediated regulation. MicroRNAs are endogenous molecules that
act by silencing targeted messenger RNAs. Although approximately
21,000 microRNAs have been identified for many species, none is

After the general introduction of the NEUROCLINOMICS project and
discussion of the Alzheimer's Disease case study, we now focus on the
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis problem. The relevant questions we wish to
address are discussed, starting from a diagnosis problem, and then
considering a prognostic prediction. The available datasets are shown,
with their particular characteristics, which many times present a real
challenge by themselves. Finally, we present and discuss the chosen
approaches to deal with the different problems, ending with the outline of
future work.

The need for integrative approaches to provide a broader understanding of brain related pathologies, in general, and neurogenerative diseases, in particular, has been largely recognised. These approaches should infer relationships between omics, clinical, and personal data. In NEUROCLINOMICS, we are interested in the development of innovative approaches to understanding neurodegenerative diseases through heterogeneous data integration.

Abstract: This talk introduces a method to design a distributed sensor network for field reconstruction that is minimal with respect to a communication cost function. This cost function is given by the sum of communication between sensors and that of a subset of sensors used for backbone communication.

Infectious diseases remain among the major causes of human death in the world. Several infections at hospitals are due to opportunistic pathogens, microorganisms that rarely infect healthy people, but are a frequent cause of infection in people with basal diseases, who are immunodepressed or debilitated. Environmental bacteria, frequently antibiotic resistant, constitute a large percentage of those pathogens. Our work focuses on understanding the mechanisms of virulence and resistance, as well as possible crosstalk, of these pathogens.

Abstract: Moraglio et al. have recently introduced new genetic
operators for genetic
programming, called geometric semantic operators. These operators induce
a unimodal fitness landscape for all the problems consisting in matching
input
data with known target outputs (like regression and classification). This
feature
facilitates genetic programming evolvability, which makes these
operators extremely
promising. Nevertheless, Moraglio et al. leave one big open problem:
these operators, by construction, always produce offspring that are
larger than their parents,

Abstract: In the recent years many bio-inspired computational methods
were defined
and successfully applied to real life problems. Examples of those methods
are particle swarm optimization, ant colony, evolutionary algorithms, and many
others. At the same time, computational formalisms inspired by natural systems
were defined and their suitability to represent different functions
efficiently was
studied. One of those is a formalism known as reaction systems. The aim of this
work is to establish, for the first time, a relationship between
evolutionary algorithms

Abstract:In recent years, the introduction of new DNA sequencing
platforms dramatically changed the landscape of genetic studies. These
protocols for next-generation sequencing (NGS) are able to generate
massive amounts of data, requiring the creation of new computational
tools to deal with this data quickly and economically. With the
development of the RNA-Seq methodology, which uses the new sequencing
protocols to get information about RNA samples, the study of the
transcriptome gained a new boost. Problems such as the identification of