Many of IIMx' main research initiatives are focused upon the definition and conception of natural information (information as it exists in nature) and natural encoding processes, construed according to scientific metaphysical premises.
It's well known that some of the most versatile and useful conceptions of natural information have orginated in the molecular biosciences. For a quick insight into the history of these concepts and the work associated with them, go here, and read this presentation post by Professor Paul E Griffiths.
There is just as much interest in different notions and conceptions of information in the fields of quantum physics and quantum information theory, and philosophers of physics and philosophers of information often work on overlapping considerations and subfields.
Significant attention has been paid to the relevance and value of different aspects of computer science to these problem domains, although apart from some applications in animal and biological signalling, the resources of computer science are relatively little applied to concepts of the dynamics of natural information in the molecular biosciences. One reason may be that there is a perception that modelling is modelling, and if one wants to build software to simulate information transmission and dynamics in biological systems and for such applications as protein synthesis and folding, then one applies the best statistical approaches and uses concepts of information flow and quantification from the molecular biosciences. Another reason may be that computational biology is sometimes regarded as a poor cousin of 'real biology' (with professional jokes to prove it!) The aim of this project is to reverse that explanatory and definitional relationship, and to use use the kind of practices that have been developed in software engineering and data modelling to help interpret natural information and natural encoding and representation.
