cellicone

Greythumb, Boston on Sept. 8, 2008.

Grey Thumb Meeting Announcement

Grey Thumb is pleased to announce a presentation by Kyle Harrington on artificial embryogeny.

When: 7:00pm Monday, September 8, 2008
Where: The Asgard Irish Pub & Restaurant (350 Mass. Ave, Central Square, Cambridge)
Who: All are welcome

[Please Note: Due to the holiday, this meeting will be held on the second Monday of the month.]

Abstract:

The simulation of multicellular organisms has been an underlying theme in a number of artificial life studies. The multicellular approach tends to be pursued by those interested in a bottom-up approach to modeling life, where multiple autonomous units form a single cohesive functional organism. This has been done for tissues and Braitenberg's Vehicles, and is being pursued for entire animals. An important benefit of a multicellular simulation comes from the embryogeny of the organism.

Artificial embryogeny is the study of the development and growth of an embryo. Such development processes have been studied by many researchers, but this has yet to lead to a functional simulation of the embryogenesis of a known animal. I will discuss a variety of research thrusts in the area of artificial embryogeny.

An essential feature of biological embryogenesis is the differentiation of cell types. I will spend the rest of the talk discussing one of the most important cell types for an organism to interact with its environment, the sensor. This is a model of a general purpose sensor designed for multiple types of stimuli. The sensor is focused on reducing the bandwidth of the connection between the organism and its environment. I argue that optimizing for this bandwidth reduction is important for distributed 3d environments, such as the EvoGrid. I will show a biologically-inspired sensor system at work in a variety of settings (including observing both Karl Sims' creatures and breve's walkers, the real-world, and an embedded ocular object for breve).


Kyle Harrington holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and is currently a Ph.D. student at Brandeis University. Website: http://cellicone.com

About Grey Thumb:

Grey Thumb is a group of scientists, engineers, hackers, artists, and hobbyists in the Boston metro area with a strong interest in artificial life, artificial intelligence, biology, complex systems and other related topics. http://www.greythumb.org


Note: Parking is available for $3 (with validation) in the garage behind The Asgard on Green St.