Over the last two decades, biological sciences have undergone radical transformation through the development of new research technologies that have produced a real explosion in the amount of data available. Just think of the modern genomic sequencing techniques that have made the sequencing of the human genome, different animal and plant organisms, and many microorganisms simpler, less expensive and more reliable with enormous benefits for diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In the wake of the ...

This focus is devoted to numerical methods for the solution of optimization problems where first order derivatives of the functions defining the problems are not available. All of the presented methods are available for download under the GPL license. The library director is Giampaolo Liuzzi (giampaolo.liuzzi@iasi.cnr.it). At the moment, the packages that can be downloaded are the following: Local Optimization SDBOX, for bound constrained problems SDPEN, for general (inequality/equality) ...

Experimental studies have shown that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, a single-cell slime mold that feeds on bacteria and spores, is able to perform tasks that are surprisingly complex for such a simple organism: for example, finding the shortest path through a maze. From these experiments and from the mathematical model proposed by biologists, IASI researchers have developed a rigorous mathematical analysis that confirms how the process followed by Physarum is a perfect "natural algorithm" ...