Research Areas  [ current interests and focus ]

My main stated research focus is in understanding systems that can assemble themselves into larger organizations. Living systems, over the 4 billion years they have existed, slowly developed into a heiarchy of scaled constructions we see today. From "simple" organic chemistry, and a lot of time, we generate protocells, bacteria, eukaryotes, multicellular organisms, ant colonies, and the United Nations (Maynard Smith's "Transitions" probably explains the idea more comprehensively than any other source). Each one of these levels implicitly functions as a building block for higher levels. How do these systems work, and do they differ from the systems we can build now? Can we harness this ability for robotics and engineered technology to create new scale-defying architectures?

Fundamentally, the problem comes down to how assembling parts organize, and understanding how this organization changes when the component "logic" and interactions change. I believe a key is to tie the information processing of the components to the resulting information processing of the full organization. Many very different systems have components which interact in very analagous ways, and identifying the subset of computational models and interactions which lead to larger organizational structures would let us decouple the physical design of a robotic assembling component, for example, from the logic and interactions it must support. Can we find a minimal logical unit with minimal interactions between units and the environment that allows increasing control over further assembly? In other words, what's the simplest something that can build anything?