Public Lectures on Arts and Sciences

Understanding and Fighting HIV/AIDS with Computational Science

Recent advances in experimental techniques such as detectors, sensors, and scanners have opened up new windows into physical and biological processes on many levels of detail. The resulting data explosion requires sophisticated techniques, like grid computing and collaborative virtual laboratories, to register, transport, store, manipulate, and share the data. The complete cascade from the individual components to the fully integrated multi-science systems crosses many orders of magnitude in temporal and spatial scales. The challenge is to study not only the fundamental processes on all these separate scales, but also their mutual coupling through the scales in the overall system, and the resulting emergent properties. These complex systems display endless signatures of order, disorder, self-organization and self-annihilation. Understanding, quantifying and handling this complexity is one of the biggest scientific challenges of our time. In this lecture Peter Sloot will present -as an example- ongoing work on modeling infectious diseases from the molecule all the way up to the population. Dr. Sloot will also identify the major hurdle for such research and a possible way to overcome that hurdle.