UNITN Converging sciences

The second edition of the Conference on Converging Sciences will be held in Trento on October 16-17, 2006. For more information please see http://www.msr-unitn.unitn.it/events/consci06.php

The University of Trento and Microsoft Research are pleased to announce the joint organization of the "Converging Sciences" Conference which is going to take place at Teatro Sociale - via Oss Mazzurana 19, 38100 Trento

KEYWORDS: Life sciences, Information technology, Complex systems, Bio-Mathematics, Physics, Environmental sciences, Computational sciences, Bio-Engineering, Behavioral economics, Cognitive sciences.

Two issues are more and more penetrating the research strategies in recent times: the convergence of disciplines and technologies and the relationship between basic research and the industrial world. This event wants to couple the two items above to delineate a road-map and a strategic vision for the future (interdisciplinary) research in life sciences, information technologies, computational physics, bio-engineering, pharmacology. The overall event wants to highlight strategic directions to pursue and to communicate potential impacts that predictive tools of biological behavior, strictly coupled with high-throughput tools and bio-materials, can have on the public as well as individual health, the society, the environment, the economic and industrial development.

A well-orchestrated research strategy in the fields outlined above could lead on one hand to predictive, preventive and personalized medicine, a challenge for life sciences in the large, and on the other hand to new models of computation and communications that could completely change the way of developing and delivering IT products nowadays.

To meet the goals described so far, we invited people from academic institutions and industries of the relevant sectors as well as politicians developing the research strategies and relevant people from the main funding agencies. To build a research infrastructure we need to build a table at which all the different components just mentioned seat together and work coherently to reach a common goal.
We hope that this event will help speeding-up the convergence process of sciences and technologies and stimulate and promote interdisciplinary activities which are mandatory to gain relevant results in the research of the next years. It will be interesting as well to see how different components of the research world consider basic research in a moment in which it is re-discovered by most funding institutions.

Although we cope with the coming seventh framework program of the EU, we will also compare different strategies of different places (USA, Japan) with representatives from all over the world. Of course the definition of general strategies facilitates a collaborative research all over the world: a condition needed for the success of ambitious programs. In particular, it would help building the European research area.
The two days are organized with keynote presentations introducing arguments that are then debated in panels and round tables. The participation of the attendees in the debate will be essential if we want to reach a consensus on the strategies to be set up in the near future.
As a concluding remark, we hope to promote a communicative research that explains its merits and potentials also to non experts of the field because this facilitates the funding of activities from institutions that must justify to citizens how money is spent.

Sponsors of the event: