RI: Small: BCSP: Robustness and Adaptation in Morphogenetic Collective Systems

本项目旨在了解生物集体自组织中组成部分的异质性、组成部分的分化/再分化以及组成部分之间的局部信息交换等一般形态发生原理的作用，并利用它们来提高集体人工系统的性能。研究分为四个步骤：(1)利用数学/计算模型研究形态发生原理对异质集体自组织模式的影响。(2)将理论研究结果应用于构建现实世界异质生物集体的实际自组织模式模型。(3)将形态发生原理引入到现有的集体人工系统中，并开发对其结构和行为进行编程的机制。(4)衡量所提出的形态发生集体系统在分散优化和勘探任务中的整体性能。这项研究为生物学和生态学提供了新的理论见解，揭示了异质集体如何在没有集中控制的情况下自我组织，并通过将形态发生原理的未探索组合引入生物启发的计算系统，为计算科学和工程做出了贡献。它有望通过为设计生长、自组织、自我修复和进化的人工制品提供一个新的框架来产生社会影响。本项目包括以下教育活动：(1)复杂系统科学跨学科研究生证书课程。(2)生命起源与进化的计算方法新课程。(3)区域高中研究计划。(4)纽约科学馆形态发生集体系统公开展览。将努力吸引目前在STEM中代表性不足的女性和少数民族学生。

The objective of this project is to understand the roles of general morphogenetic principles such as heterogeneity of components, differentiation/re-differentiation of components, and local information exchange among components in the self-organization of biological collectives, and to utilize them to improve the performance of collective artificial systems. The research is conducted in the following four steps: (1) Study the effects of morphogenetic principles on self-organizing patterns of heterogeneous collectives using mathematical/computational models. (2) Apply the results of theoretical investigation to construct models of actual self-organizing patterns found in real-world heterogeneous biological collectives. (3) Introduce the morphogenetic principles to existing collective artificial systems and develop mechanisms for programming their structures and behaviors. (4) Measure the overall performance of the proposed morphogenetic collective systems in decentralized optimization and exploration tasks. This research contributes to biology and ecology by providing new theoretical insight into how heterogeneous collectives may self-organize without centralized control, and also to computational science and engineering by bringing an unexplored combination of morphogenetic principles into bio-inspired computational systems. It is expected to produce societal impacts by providing a novel framework for the design of growing, self-organizing, self-repairing, and evolving artifacts. This project involves the following educational activities: (1) Interdisciplinary graduate certificate program in complex systems science. (2) New course on computational approaches to the origin and evolution of life. (3) Regional high school research program. (4) Public exhibition of morphogenetic collective systems at New York Hall of Science. Efforts will be made to attract female and ethnic minority students who are currently underrepresented in STEM.