Christopher D. Clack

BioScience Computing

BioScience Computing exploits the synergy of challenges facing both Computer Science and Biology, drawing inspiration from Biology to solve Computer Science challenges and simultaneously using new bio-inspired adaptive software to model and simulate biological systems.

I lead the BioScience Computing Interest Group, which comprises over 30 members from both Computer Science and the Life Sciences in London and the South East region.

BioScience Computing: Modelling Drug Delivery for Chemotherapy There is significant interest in the vasculature of cancerous tissue, which is thought to contribute significantly to drug delivery resistance by limiting blood flow to the tumour target, yet the Extra Cellular Matrix (ECM) and its role in hindering drug delivery are often overlooked. Improved understanding of the ECM must come from (i) phenomenological studies, (ii) study of individual components, and (iii) study of how behaviour at the whole-system level is related to or emerges from the interactions between the system’s components. Agent-based modelling is especially apt for the latter approach because the model is defined at the component level.

Other work in the area of BioScience Computing includes:

• The Artificial Cytoskeleton (PhD student Katie Bentley, collaborating with Eileen Cox at the Natural History Museum)
  • Morphological Plasticity: Environmentally Driven Morphogenesis, K.Bentley and C.Clack, VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2005), September 2005 Gzipped PDF (768k).
  • The Artificial Cytoskeleton for Lifetime Adaptation of Morphology, K.Bentley and C.Clack, in workshop proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALIFE IX), Boston(12-15 Sept 2004), Eds. Bedau, M., Husbands, P., Hutton, T., Kumar, S., and Suzuki, H., pp 13-16, 2004 PDF (380k).
• Computational Simulation of Drug Transport for Cancer Tumour Chemotherapy (undergraduate project students Semenova, Radif and Chen, collaborating with Sylvia Nagl at the Department of Oncology)
  • Modelling the movement of antibodies towards the tumour in Cancer Chemotherapy. (Chih-Chun Chen, MScCS 2005) (link to Chih-Chun's project report).
  • Simulation of cancer tumour therapy using agent-based programming and a cellular automaton (Mo Radif, BSc 2005) (link to Mo's project report)
  • Simulation of cancer tumour therapy using agent-based programming and a cellular automaton (Anastasia Semenova, MSci, 2005) (link to Anna's project report)
• Development of nature-inspired algorithms
  • Royal Road Encodings and Schema Propagation in Selective Crossover, K.Vekaria and C.Clack, In Suzuki, Y., Ovaska, S., Furuhashi, T., Roy, R., and Dote, Y. (eds.) Soft Computing in Industrial Applications, pp 281-292. Springer-Verlag. Proceedings of WSC4 (21-30 Sept 1999). 2000 Postscript (175k).
  • Hitchhikers Get Around K.Vekaria and C.Clack, in Proceedings Artificial Evolution (EA) 1999, November 3-5, LIL, Universite du Littoral, Dunkerque, France. Research Note RN/99/11, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. 1999. Postscript (482k). See LNCS 1829.
  • Schema Propagation in Selective Crossover K.Vekaria and C.Clack, in late breaking papers at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO'99), eds. S.Brave and A.S.Wu, pages 268-275. 1999Gzipped PDF(6.12M).
  • Biases Introduced by Adaptive Recombination Operators, K.Vekaria and C.Clack, in Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO'99), July 13-17, 1999, Orlando, Florida USA, eds. Banzhaf et al., pp 670-677, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 1558606114 1999. Postscript gecco99(783k).
  • Selective Crossover in Genetic Algorithms: An Empirical Study, K.Vekaria and C.Clack, Proc. 5th Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, LNCS 1498, pp 438-447, 1998. Postscript (447k), PDF (58k).
  • Selective Crossover in Genetic Algorithms, K.Vekaria and C.Clack, Proc. Genetic Programming 1998, pp 609, 1998 Postscript (92k).
  • Recursion, Lambda Abstraction and Genetic Programming, T.Yu and C.Clack, Proc. Third Genetic Programming Conference, J.R. Koza, W. Banzhaf, K.Chellapilla, K. Deb, M. Dorigo, D.B. Fogel, M.H. Garzon, D.E. Goldberg, H. Iba, R. Riolo (Eds.), pp 422-431, Morgan Kaufmann, 1-55860-548-7.1998. Postscript (141k).
  • PolyGP: A Polymorphic Genetic Programming System in Haskell, T.Yu and C.Clack, Proc. Third Genetic Programming Conference, J.R. Koza, W. Banzhaf, K.Chellapilla, K. Deb, M. Dorigo, D.B. Fogel, M.H. Garzon, D.E. Goldberg, H. Iba, R. Riolo (Eds.), pp 416-421, Morgan Kaufmann, 1-55860-548-7. 1998. Postscript (106k).
  • Performance-Enhanced Genetic Programming, C.Clack and T.Yu, Proc. Evolutionary Programming 1997 Conference (EP'97), P.J. Angeline, R.G. Reynolds, J.R. McDonnell, and R. Eberhart (Eds), pp 87-100, Springer Verlag, LNCS 1213, ISBN 3-540-62788-X, 1997. Postscript (120k).
  • PolyGP: A Polymorphic Genetic Programming System in Haskell, T.Yu and C.Clack, in J.Koza (ed) Late breaking papers at the Genetic Programming 1997 Conference, pp 264-272, 1997.
  • Genetic Programming with Gene Dominance, K.Vekaria and C.Clack, in J.Koza (ed) Late breaking papers at the Genetic Programming 1997 Conference, pp 300, Stanford University, ISBN 0-18-206995-8 1997. Postscript (57K).