Cells, Termites, and Robot Collectives
Radhika Nagpal , Associate Professor of Computer Science, Harvard SEAS
| When: | Feb 02, 2012 | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm |
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| Where: | Maxwell Dworkin G115 |
Biological systems, from multicellular organisms to social insects, harness vast numbers of unreliable and independant agents to achieve complex global goals. Technological advances have made it possible to imagine and create our own large-scale multi-agent systems: vast sensor-rich environments, swarms of mobile robots, self-reconfigurable modular robots, and so on.
Yet programming and controlling such decentralized systems remains a challenge: how do we effectively create systems of the scale and complexity that nature achieves? In this talk, I will present several ongoing projects, all of which tackle the problem of understanding and designing self-organizing multi-agent systems. In two of the projects, we use inspiration from nature to design collective robotic systems and in the third project, we study how collective behavior arises in multicellular tissues.
A common theme in all of our work is understanding the global-to-local relationship: how robust collective behavior arises from many locally interacting agents, and how we can systematically program the local interactions of simple agents to achieve the global behaviors we want.
| Speaker Biography: | Radhika Nagpal is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science from MIT, and spent a year as a research fellow at the Systems Biology department at the Harvard Medical School. She is a recipient of the 2005 Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship award, the 2007 NSF Career award, the 2009 Thomas D. Cabot associate professor chair, and the 2010 Borg Early Career Award. |
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| Contact: |
Gioia Sweetland
gioia@seas.harvard.edu 617-495-2919 |
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