For the previous five weeks (two at ELSI, and three at RIKEN Kobe), we have had a 'working workshop' to explore the creation of computational models to understand aspects of the Origins of Life.
The workshop brought together people with many different areas of expertise - Category theory, chemistry, biology, astrophysics, geophysics, and computer science.
By working together in person, we were able to reach a shared understanding of different aspects of problems in the Origins of life.
Furthermore, as a result of the workshop we've started several computational projects that will hopefully lead to long-term collaborations between the participants.
I will discuss in particular the projects that have been started in modelling of the emergence of multilevel organization (multicellularity, multi-level selection), metrics for detecting the emergence of heredity, and a computational framework that permits exploratory investigation of generative chemistries, as well as give a survey of the results we have obtained so far.