Abstract

This talk will present computational methods for synthesizing complex systems out of elementary building blocks, and the application of such methods to design automation and their implication to understanding evolution of complexity in nature and in engineering. At the computational synthesis lab at Cornell we have been applying these ideas mostly in the area of evolutionary robotics and artificial life. Our investigation of these evolutionary design systems now gives rise to deeper questions, not unlike biological evolution: Under what condition can the evolutionary process yield functionally complex designs? It seems that simple mutation-selection processes only go part of the way, and more elaborate processes may be taking place. In particular, functional modularity, structural regularity and hierarchy may play an important role in the scaling of evolutionary processes. This talk will overview some of these challenges, and describe a number of new models and approaches that exploit the co-evolution of modular architectures.

Biography

Hod Lipson joined the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computing and Information Science in 2001. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brandeis University's Computer Science Department, working on evolutionary computation and evolutionary robotics, and a Lecturer at MIT's Mechanical Engineering Department, where conducted research in design automation. Lipson is interested in computational methods for synthesizing complex systems out of elementary building blocks, and the application of such methods to design automation and their implication to understanding evolution of complexity in nature and in engineering.