Team:SEU/Description
Project Description
Motivation
Artificial intelligence is one prevailing research field in recent years due to its successful application in areas like medical care, computer vision and natural language processing. Most of artificial intelligence systems are implemented with silicon-based chips which have high area complexity and power cost when facing large systems. Is it possible to use bio-chemical materials to implement artificial intelligence systems more efficiently?
Preliminaries
DNA strands have been proved a powerful medium to perform computation. Previous researches [1], [2] have shown some interesting applicatoins of such materials, which implemented a "probabilistic switch" and a pattern recognition machine, respectively. Computation systems in this field are usually based on DNA strand displacement reactions. [3] and [4] provide vivid demonstration of how such reactions proceed in molecular level.
Our Work
In this project, we have employed DNA reactions to implement neural networks which are basic components in artificial intelligence systems. Specifically, using molecular concentrations as input and output signals, we propose and demonstrate computation models for weighted summation (including multiplication and addition) and activation functions (e.g, ReLU and Sigmoid) which are arithmetic operations in neural networks. Also, the classical backpropagation algorithm which is utilized in the training process can be similarly constructed (which has not been studied in molecular computing to our best knowledge). Based on these models, we synthesize basic neural networks with DNA strand displacement reactions.
To help other researchers obtain the proposed DNA-based artificial neural networks, we develop a software tool to automatically generate DNA reaction models and relevant DNA sequences according to the required parameters of neural networks, which may help them with further bio-computer design and bio-robot design.
For more details, please browse our Contribution Page.
References
[1] Wilhelm, Daniel, Jehoshua Bruck, and Lulu Qian. "Probabilistic switching circuits in DNA." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115.5 (2018): 903-908.
[2] Cherry, Kevin M., and Lulu Qian. "Scaling up molecular pattern recognition with DNA-based winner-take-all neural networks." Nature 559.7714 (2018): 370.