GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2006

February 16, 12:00 p.m., Berger Auditorium, Skirkanich Hall (210 S. 33rd Street)

Radhika Nagpal
Harvard University

"Engineering Self-Organizing Systems" 

Abstract: Biological systems 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? 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 wireless sensor networks and collective robotics. 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 cardiac cell synchonization to design self-repairing algorithms for "desynchronization" and TDMA channel sharing in wireless sensor networks.

Biography: Radhika Nagpal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University since 2004. She recieved her PhD degree in Computer Science from MIT in 2001. In between she was a postdoc lecturer at MIT and then a research fellow at the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School. In 2005 she received the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship award. Her research interests are biologically-inspired approaches for multi-agent/distributed systems and modelling multicellular behavior in biology.


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