Maxson Lectures - Emergent Phenomena In Programmable Matter

Date: April 26, 2022

Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Location: BLOC 117

Speaker: Dana Randall, Georgia Institute of Technology

Description: Active matter describes ensembles of self-organizing agents, or particles, interacting with their local environments so that their micro-scale behavior determines macro-scale characteristics of the ensemble. While there has been a surge of activity exploring the physics underlying such systems, less attention has been paid to questions of how to program them to achieve desired outcomes. We will present some recent results designing programmable active matter for specific tasks, including aggregation, dispersion, speciation, and locomotion, building on insights from stochastic algorithms and statistical physics.