Abstract

Unlike digital electronics and the internet, which relies on open standards and formats allowing universal implementation, the chemical and material sciences are in the dark ages. This is because chemistry relies on expert users to design, carry out and analyse chemical processes making universal reproducibility impossible. Biology also suffers from the same problem but biology itself has codified chemical space in producing entities that use a common coding system (nucleic acids) and functional polymers that are decoded by the ribosome (amino acids). Our grand aim is to develop chemical and biological cybernetics. In Glasgow, to achieve this goal, we are aiming to combine robotics, artificial intelligence and design of new algorithms and sensor interfaces to control chemistry, material, and biological systems. In this talk I will describe approaches to: i) The digitisation of chemistry and chemical robots. ii) Construction of a real materials genome that boot straps to biological systems. iii) Approachestoartificialbiologyandunderstandingtheoriginoflife iv) Developmentofnewcomputingarchitecturesusingchemical/biologicalcomputing.