At the coffee meeting on Aug.8 (Fri.) this week (12:30-, Main research building, room 433), we have invited Dr. Toshiki Kindo (Grand Master, BR Intelligent Vehicle Development Dept., TOYOTA Motor Corporation) who is a head of the autonomous car development in TOYOTA Company. He will tell us recent developments of the autonomous car and also the need of theoretical/computational scientists in the area of computational-science and robotics in the company such as TOYOTA. .

Dr. Kindo received his PhD in theoretical nuclear physics (Tohoku Univ.) by his work on Skyrmion in hadron physics. After his short informal talk (30 min) in Japanese from 12:30, we will have Q&A session too. Feel free to join !

The joint annual meeting of the Japanese Society for Mathematical Biology and the Society for Mathematical Biology took place in Osaka Nakanoshima on July 28-August 1, 2014. The meeting had around 500 participants, and included more than 100 oral sessions in total, about 10 parallel sessions in a single time slot. The topics of the meeting covered almost entire fields of Biology - from the molecular level to the ecosystem level, prokaryote to eukaryote, animals to plants. Examples include single molecule behaviors and chemical reactions in a single cell, multicellular collective phenomena such as embryonic development and physiology, population dynamics like ecology, evolution and spreading of infectious diseases. Corresponding to having these diverse fields in Biology, we could see a lot of different theoretical approaches in the meeting as well - physical modeling (nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics), chemical kinetic theory, statistic and stochastic theory, and information theory, which strongly reminds us the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for full understanding of Biology. We could also see some clear trends that progresses in experimental techniques are now getting theory to be quantitatively tested. Members of the iTHES Theoretical Biology Team (Gen, Masashi, and Atsushi) organized mini-symposia in the meeting, providing the opportunities for intense discussions about the circadian oscillators, dynamical behaviors of organelles and theory for the complex gene-regulatory/metabolic networks.

Hello, everyone. I am Chieko OKUMURA,　a secretary in the Theoretical Biology Laboratory.

I would like to support your works, especially for clerical matters. If you have any problems, please feel free to let me know.

I'm looking forward to working with you, thank you.