josh bongard
university of vermont
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The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology. We’ve been running for 6 years now and have hosted over fifty entrepreneurs and academics who have built billion-dollar companies and published foundational papers that drive the AI field forward.
In the lead up to our 6th annual event that will be broadcast live online on the 26th June 2020, we’re running a series of speaker profiles highlighting what you can expect to learn on the day!
Natural vs. synthetic materials
The world around us is composed of living organisms and synthetic materials. Even though living systems are extremely robust, diverse, complex, and supportive of human life, the majority of the complex technologies in existence today are derived from synthetic sources. These include silicon, plastics, steel, and concrete, for example.
Making things out of living materials has proven challenging because they exhibit robustness of structure and function and thus tend to resist adopting the new behaviors imposed on them. Even so, advances in genome engineering, simulation, and AI-directed evolution has begun to unlock a new era of organism design. Recall Aaron Kimball’s talk at RAAIS 2019, in which he demonstrated how Zymergen engineers microbes as factories to produce high-value materials that are orthogonal to petrochemical-derived materials.
Computational design of novel lifeforms
Josh Bongard is the Veinott Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont, where he runs the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory. His group focuses on evolutionary robotics, evolutionary computation, and physical simulation. Since the early 2000s, Josh has been working on computational approaches to the automated design and manufacture of soft-, evolved-, and crowdsourced robots, as well as computer-designed organisms.
Computer-designed robots (top) with their their real-life cell analogs (bottom) (WIRED/Douglas Blackiston)
Earlier this year, Josh and his collaborators at Tufts and Harvard published an exciting study that shows how goal-driven system design in simulation can be used to generate biological organisms with desired behaviors. They use frog embryos as a model organism and seek to modify locomotion, object manipulation, object transport, and collective behavior of the embryos. In their work, an evolutionary algorithm operated over a set of biological building blocks with the goal of suggesting optimal designs that are empirically tested using a frog cell-based construction toolkit. The study shows that fine-grained simulations can be embedded in evolutionary search methods to discover designs that can be instantiated in biological rather than artificial materials.
Together with advances in machine learning, soft body simulation, and bioprinting, Josh’s work will likely see broadened potential as we seek to diversify from synthetic materials into organic, living materials.
To find out more about Josh’s work, peruse his website, follow his MOOC on evolutionary robotics through reddit, read his book, How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence, and follow him on Twitter here.
We’re excited to be hosting Josh at RAAIS 2020, welcome!