Intelligent systems must sense their environment and then actuate or change behavior in response to that information. Over developmental and evolutionary timescales, biological systems often iterate between sensing and actuating to optimize or learn a desired function. We want to design materials and devices that can similarly sense, actuate, and learn to address grand societal challenges – such as sustainability, climate change, and human diseases – in ways that are different from and disruptive to existing technologies. We focus here on sensing, actuating, and learning processes that are emergent: they stem from the collective actions of many units (molecules, cells, struts/beams) to produce behaviors that cannot be predicted from the properties of just a few units.
Several example research projects available to the EmIRGE-Bio participants are listed on a separate page.
Each EmIRGE-Bio participant will be matched with at least one faculty mentor to pursue a research project in this broad field of emergent intelligence. The faculty mentor(s) are affiliated with the trainee’s home department and can serve as thesis supervisor. These projects must meet our training research project criteria:
- involve faculty mentoring teams with at least two faculty from different fields,
- identify two primary mentors who commit to mentoring two graduate NRT trainees through two independent and self-contained Ph.D. dissertations,
- explicitly identify diverse techniques and skill sets that trainees will learn during the project, and
- explain how trainees will be exposed to data-driven and iterative research approaches that integrate simulations/theory, experiments, and data analytics to reveal the underlying principles governing the mechanisms of emergent intelligence in complex systems.
