DLS Talk by Radhika Nagpal (Princeton University)

Speaker:  Dr. Radhika Nagpal, Professor of Robotics, Princeton University

Title:  Taming the Swarm

Abstract: 

In nature, thousands of individuals can cooperate to achieve complex goals from local interactions -- from cells that form complex organisms, to social insects like ants and bees, to the complex and mesmerizing motion of fish schools and bird flocks. These systems are fascinating to scientists and engineers alike: even though each individual has limited ability, as a collective they seem to behave as one. What would it take to create our own artificial collectives of the scale and complexity that nature achieves? In this talk I will discuss how biological swarms can inspire new forms of artificial intelligence and physical robotic systems.

Bio:

Radhika Nagpal is a Professor at Princeton University, jointly in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science Departments, where she leads the Self-organizing Swarms and Robotics Group (SSR).  Nagpal is a leading researcher in swarm robotics, bio-inspired algorithms, and collective intelligence. Projects from her lab include bio-inspired multi-robot systems such as the Kilobot thousand-robot swarm, Termes collective construction robots, and BlueSwarm underwater robots (Science 2014, Science Robotics 2021) as well as models of biological collective intelligence (Nature Comms. 2022). Nagpal is also known for her Scientific American blog article (“The Awesomest 7 Year Postdoc”, 2013) advocating academic cultural change and she received the Anita Borg Early Career Award (2010) and McDonald Mentoring Award (2015).  In 2017 Nagpal co-founded ROOT Robotics, an educational robotics company now part of iRobot. Nagpal was named by Nature magazine as one of the top ten influential researchers of the year (2014) and was a TED speaker in 2017.

Host: Margo Seltzer, UBC Computer Science