The Semantics of Information

Motivation

One of the most persuasive indicators of the emergence of computer science as a mature field of science is the number of efforts to apply the theory and results of computer science to other areas of science and engineering. This “reaching out” by researchers in computer science has resulted in a recent spate of applications of results from computer science and from its theoretical underpinnings to other areas of science and engineering. To name a few, there are:

• new models of classical and quantum physics, computing and information that have emerged from work relying on category theory and domain theory,
• the growth from the turn of this century of the application of process algebra and related techniques from concurrency theory - especially those using stochastic models - to biology. This comes under the heading "systems biology", although the term also includes the area of computational science, which uses computers more or less as black box computational devices to generate simulations of biological phenomena, and
• increasing evidence that the work on game semantics and its application to computation has important features in common with economic game theory.

These advances have led to a rise in interest by researchers within computer science in applying results from their research to other areas of science, and concomitantly to an increasing receptiveness to and interest by researchers in the target areas to share knowledge and seek new models for their areas of research based on computational results and the theories that underlie them.

The Semantics of Information Seminar at Schloß Dagstuhl is an effort to further the dialog between researchers in these disparate areas, with the aim of finding problems of common interest, and of applying techniques that have been devised to solve problems in one of these areas to help solve problems in other areas where the techniques may be applicable. The results we described above can be seen as instances of the semantics of information in other areas of science and engineering. The seminar will feature talks by leading researchers in these areas, as well as ample time for the participants to interact with one another to discuss problems of mutual interest.