BioDynaMo is an International project devoted to promoting a new way of integrating computer simulations, broadly, in biomedical research.
In facts, until yesterday any researcher interested in exploring the implications of her/his conjecture by computer simulations, ahead of experimental design, would struggle to produce her/his own simulation, making design choices finely tuned for her/his purposes, but likely to translate into a barrier for re-uptake of the tool by peers, and that would also require a complete re-engineering should the simulation be successful enough to be interesting to run it at scale, as instance on HPC clusters. Today, BioDynaMo offers a first incarnation of an agent based simulation environment (engine and language) that has already proven to be scalable and easily extensible across domains. The code is licensed under Apache 2.0 as the consortium feels this should be made available to everyone: it is commons in its very meaning, a fertilizer for the mission to advance the practices around computer simulations in biomedical research. Today the mission is to make it possible for researchers to build on top of each other modeling efforts, to be able to scale interesting models as research grows more complex or deep without paying any extra toll to technical debt, and to be able to run competitive models in consistent environments and conditions. The vision is for a future when null distributions or "controls" could be potentiated if not fully substituted by openly validated and trusted simulations, limiting the burden in terms of lives of biomedical advancement and speeding up progress.
All of the above is part of the reasons why SCImPULSE Foundation has always remained very close to the project, since the time it was launched by CERN and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. And today we are proud to announce that as a sign of the convergent maturation of our strategic investments, during the Consortium meeting held on October the 16th 2020, the Collaboration Board has unanymously approved the inclusion of SCImPULSE Foundation as a full member, upon SCImPULSE proposal to contribute to the planning and coordination of a new outreach stage, focused on growing the user base and attracting and managing a community of developers independent from the founding Instutes, and to push forward the development of educational offer around biodynamo.
SCImPULSE Foundation will also run its own flavour of research with biodynamo, around the investigation of the boundary conditions that would allow the emergence of an "embedded embodied intelligence" from a tight community of agents... This could be reminescent of famous milestones of experimental mathematics, but we humbly recognize that the case of a dynamic scenario with coexisting populations of different agents with disparate goals and languages, and varying boundary conditions is an exceedingly hard case, and whilst we find value in letting ourselves be guided by our curiosity, the proper formulation and tackling of this endeavour alone will require that we adopt new methods, expand our own internal culture, and chiefly establish new partnerships with research groups that have made amazing progresses in the past decades in studying open games, networks, and cellular automata, among else...
But this will be material for long exchanges with you in the future... for the time being, let us bid good bye by sharing this eye-candy simulation from BioDynaMo:
Comments
Post a Comment