Abstract:

Membrane computing is a branch of natural computing which abstracts 
computing models starting from the structure and the functioning
of the cell and from the cooperation of cells in tissues, organs, etc.
Several cell-like, tissue-like, and neural-like models were considered
(called, in general, P systems). The main ingredients are the
compartmentalization, multiset processing, parallelism. Most of these
systems were proved to be Turing complete and, in many cases where an
enhanced parallelism is available, polynomial solutions to computationally
hard problems (typically, NP-complete problems) were devised. No lab
implementation was reported, but many programs for simulating P systems are
available. Membrane computing is much explored as a framework for writing
models for biological and bio-medical processes, while applications to/links
with economics, approximate optimization, computer graphics, linguistics,
cryptography, etc were reported.
Comprehensive details can be found at http://psystems.disco.unimib.it
The talk will be an overview of the domain, only introducing the basic
notions and types of P systems, types of results, some typical applications