CS Colloquia: Engineering Self-Organizing Systems

Title: Engineering Self-Organizing SystemsSpeaker: Prof. Radhika Nagpal(Harvard)ABSTRACT:
Biological systems, from embryos to ant colonies, achieve tremendous
mileage by using vast numbers of cheap and unreliable components to
achieve complex goals reliably. We are rapidly building embedded systems
with similar characteristics, from self-assembling modular robots to vast
sensor networks. How do we engineer robust collective behavior?In this talk, I will describe two projects from my group where we have
used inspiration from nature, both cells and social insects, to design
decentralized algorithms for programmable self-assembly. In the first
project, we use insights from social insects to design algorithms for
collective construction by simple mobile robots. In the second project we
use insights from multicellular tissues to design a modular robot that can
form complex environmentally-adaptive shapes. In both cases we can achieve
global-to-local compilation: the agents rely on simple and local
interactions that provably self-organize a wide class of user-specified
global goals.BIO:
Radhika Nagpal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard
University since 2004. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science
from MIT, and spent a year as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School.
She is a recipient of the 2005 Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship award and
the 2007 NSF Career award. Her research interests are
biologically-inspired engineering principles for multi-agent systems and
modelling multicellular biology.

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia