The visiting program of the GRK starts in October with James Abello, Rutgers University. James Abello is well known for his ground breaking research in the visualization of massive graphs. In November Herbert Sauro from Keck Graduate Institute, will come to Rostock. Herbert Sauro, an internationally recognized researcher in the area of Systems Biology, is possibly best known for his significant contributions to SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language) and  the SBW (Systems Biology Workbench). Stefan Schuster from the University of Jena and Lena Stroemback from the University of Linköpings University were also visiting our kickoff workshop. Another highlight of our kickoff workshop was the talk given by  Luca Cardelli  from Microsoft Research Cambridge. Luca is highly renowned for his work in computer science, since 2000 he has been involved in computational methods in systems biology pushing the envelope of research.