Speaker：Robert H. Austin

Time：2020/1/6日 10：00 A.M

Location：Room 1212, Zhiyuan Building

Abstarct：

Synthetic social agents (robots) when immersed in a complex, evolving environment which is locally degraded by the agent's local presence can reveal emergent communal social dynamics and adaptation. We present a community of analog/digital robots, which move over a resource landscape generated by a large light-emitting diode (LED) light board whose local RGB intensity represents nested resource landscapes, each resource landscape is associated with a give RGB color. Each robot has a basic digital genotype that codes for the response (analog phenotype) to a given RGB local resource level,and side sensors and LEDs which provide communication with neighboring robots and gene exchange (robot sex). The robots move in response to the current local resource gradient given by the gradient in color intensity of their position on the light board which they deplete, warp drive. The robot “genes” mutate at a rate inversely proportional to the resource intensity at their position representing stress due to resource consumption. This analog/digital robot community has great generality which spans the space of many-body soft-matter physics, evolutionary biology and multi-cell collective states.

Brief introduction of speaker:

Bob Austin was a student of Hans Frauenfelder when biological physics in physics departments was an outlier. His interests have evolved from fundamentals of protein dynamics to quantum effects in biology to collective dynamics of agents in complex ecologies to the physics of cancer. Dr. Austin is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, member of the National Academy of Sciences, Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He won the Lilienfeld Prize and the Delbruck Prize of the American Physical Society. He served as the Chair of the Division of Biological Physics, was a Founder of the Topical Group on Medical Physics of the American Physical Society. He was the Chair of the NRC Review of the NIST Physics Lab.