HSB 2014 PROCEEDINGS: EDITOR'S PREFACE

This volume contains the papers presented at HSB'14: 3rd International Workshop on Hybrid Systems and Biology held on July 22-23, 2014 in Vienna. This edition of the workshop is affiliated with CAV14  (26th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification), part of the Vienna Summer of Logic (VSL).  

Hybrid modeling techniques, combining discrete and continuous processes, are gaining more and more attention in systems biology. As the challenges of scale and intrinsic inhomogeneity are coming to the forefront of systems biology efforts, they highlight the value of a hybrid dynamical modeling paradigm that integrates mathematical models that address distinct spatio-temporal scales and subsystems.

In this spirit, the scope of the HSB workshop is the general area of dynamical models in Biology with an emphasis on hybrid approaches, which are not restricted to a narrow class of mathematical models, and which take advantage of techniques developed separately in different sub-fields. We aim to bring together researchers in computer science, mathematics, and life sciences, interested in the opportunities and the challenges of hybrid modeling applied to systems biology. 

The workshop programme includes invited talks by Calin Guet (IST Austria) on Synthetic Systems Biology and by David Harel (Weizmann Institute) on The Whole Organism Challenge. In addition to the 8 contributed papers, there will be three tutorials on computational tools and a special session on examples of successful collaboration with biologists.