The International Workshop on Molecular Computing was held at I.I.T., Chennai during Dec. 14-15, 1998. This preconference workshop to the annual FST&TCS conference was organized by Prof.~Kamala Krithivasan as part of the Silver Jubilee Celebrations of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, I.I.T, Madras. All the talks in this workshop were invited talks.
Mathematical Biology is a highly inter-disciplinary area lying at the intersection of Mathematics and Biology. DNA computing may be viewed as Biological Mathematics and is a very young active area of research. The question whether DNA could be used at the basis of a computing device has given rise to this new topic of research.
The talk by Prof. Rani Siromoney gave a fundamental introduction to this topic. Her highly composed talk surveyed the theoretical research on DNA computing. The talk by Natasha Jonaska dealt with three dimensional graph structures for solving computational problem with DNA molecules. She described how ideas from knot theory are useful here. Algorithms to solve the Hamiltonian cycle problem and the three vertex colorability problem were discussed. Prof. John Reif's talk on ``Self-assembly techniques in Molecular Computation'' explained the potential of experiments proposed for solving problems using DNA computing. Prof. Kamala Krithivasan's talk on graph splicing systems dealt with extending the application of the operation of splicing to graphs. Prof. Yasubumi Sakakibara discussed the use of splicing operations on tree-like structures and discussed multiple splicing. Dr. K.G. Subramanian talked about another variation of splicing systems, circular splicing systems. The extension of splicing operation to arrays was presented by Dr. R. Rama. The list of speakers included Prof. Ponnammal Natarajan of Anna University.
Apart from the invited talks, some simple new results on simple extended H systems were presented by A. Arvind.
There was very good participation and the talks were well received. On the whole, this workshop has created an awareness and interest in this area among the Theoretical Computer Science Community.