The workshop is scheduled to start at 1:30p.m. and finish at 6 p.m. on July 5th, 2014.

Organizers:

Prof. Antonio Scala - London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Institute for Complex Systems at CNR, Italy

Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov - Boston University, Harvard Medical School and Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

VISION

Plants are able of amazing sensing capabilities. They sense the environment and when subject to suitable stimuli they generate electrical signals. The PLEASED project is developing a technology to collect and analyse such signals, to use plants as the next generation organic sensing devices. In this perspective, PLEASED technology is not simply inspired by plants, it is an attempt to develop a "Plant Cyborg".

OBJECTIVES

* The first open dataset collecting the electrical signals generated by plants in reaction to specific stimuli (the PLEASED kit)

* The design of classifiers capable to recognize and classify the signals generated by single plants or groups of plants

* A testbed dataset to verify the performance of classification algorithms on plants

Project PLEASED is introducing new standards in the acquisition of electro-physiological signals from plants and is building a massive database of experiments relating plants responses to a wide variety of stimuli. Since the very beginning of the project, it has been clear that a huge amount of work must be done in refining both the deterministic models of plant response (often inspired to the classical neuronal transmission models) and in finding new tools to analyze the statistics and the spectra of plant signals.

By confronting our experience to the knowledge accumulated in the analysis of electro-physiological signals in living being, we intend to build up a community of scientists interested in exploring this exciting field of signals in plants that promises new insights in what we should consider a communicating, intelligent, social living being.

During the workshop, we will have a short demo and introduction to our plant database that will allow people to start working with plant signals. Moreover, we will have a short demo and intro to the signal-taking techniques in plants.