Amorphous Computing: Related Sites

Related Sites

Last update: 7/25/02

MEMS ISAT Study This is a conference which Hal and Andy Berlin organized, where you see some of the origins of amorphous computing at MIT and smart matter at Xerox. Also see Strategic Directions in Computing Position Statement - A. Berlin
Programming a Paintable Computer, at the Media Lab (Bill Butera, PhD Thesis 2002). Also see Pushpin Computing, for a physical instantantiation.
Microbial Engineering, Tom Knight's biology lab on the 9th floor and Ron Weiss's new lab at Princeton.

Biological Pattern Formation, an on-line book by Hans Meinhardt.
Visual Models of Morphogenesis, a really excellent on-line essay with movies covering reaction-diffusion, L-systems, cellular automata approaches both for biology and computer graphics.
The Interactive Fly, everything you ever want to know about Drosophila Development.
Reaction Diffusion, shows the kinds of patterns obtained by the Gray-Scott model of a chemical reaction.
Exploring Emergence. An excellent active essay on cellular automata local rules, by Mitchell Resnick and Brian Silverman.

Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams by Resnick. Starlogo programming model for swarms of things moving in a space. Nice modelling environment for many phenomena (examples).
Complex Systems: Santa Fe Institute, and the New England Institute of Complex Systems (NECSI).
Boids (Flocks, Herds, and Schools: a Distributed Behavioral Model)
Reynold's famous paper with simple local rules that produce flocking behavior.
Ruud Schoonderwoerd's work on using ant trail behavior to design a simple local rules for adapting a telecommunication network to congestion.
Pattern formation in swarms (paper by Erik Rauch, Mark Millonas, Dante Chialvo)

Kris Pister's group at Berkeley. Smart Dust, Macromotes and finally the now commercially avialble Berkeley motes; also more recently micromechanical robots and flying insects. Also, see a very nice Master's thesis by James McLurkin titled "Algorithms for Distributed Sensor Networks".
Smart Matter Group at Xerox PARC (Andy Berlin, et al). Active columns with sensors/actuators to adapt to stress, airvalve arrays to programmably route paper.
Chih-Ming Ho's Research Group at UCLA, airplane wing with sensors and actuators to control surface shear stress and reduce drag.
Other MEMs resources: UCLA EE Low Power Wireless Integrated Microsensors (WINS), MEMs Clearinghouse
NEST (Network Embedded Systems) Project, by DARPA. MIT AI Lab and Space Lab(Shrobe, Williams, Bachrach, etc). Many other groups at different universities exploring ideas and paradigms for programming smart dust, and using the Berkeley motes.
Deborah Estrin's Group at UCLA, algorithms for wireless sensor networks.

Self-reconfiguring Robots at The Dartmouth Robotics Lab (Daniela Rus, et al). Crystalline robot with compressible cube-like units.
CONRO Reconfigurable Robotics Project at USC/ISI (Peter Will et al). Chain/tree like robots built of homogeneous units (spiders, caterpillars, type locomotion).
Modular Robotics at (Xerox) PARC (Mark Yim, et al). Polybot,Polypod and Proteo reconfigurable robots. More recently building the telecube, 3D version of the Darmouth robot.

Pheromone Robots at HRL (Hughes Research Labs). Teams of physical mobile robots, with Palm V brains, that explore and coordinate by exchanging "pheromones".
Maya Mataric's Group at USC, behavior based robotics, combination of basis behaviors for ant-like robots.
Collective Intelligence Group at NASA Ames (Kagan Tumer, David Wolpert), exploring algorithms (learning) for distributed robotics for space exploration. Also recently held a Workshop on Collectives and the Design of Complex Systems (August 2002).
Programming the Swarm, Dave Evan's group at University of Virginia; investigating ideas inspired by ants as well as developmental biology.

Pervasive Computing and Ad-Hoc Networking: Hari BalaKrishnan's group at MIT, Hyphos by Robert Poor (PhD Thesis 2001, MIT Media Lab), with routing by climbing gradients.
Packet Radio Networking: Alot of relevant old work from the 70s (e.g. Silvester and Kleinrock, why six is a magic number).
Nancy Lynch Distributed Computing at MIT
Awerbuch Baruch's Research page Several interesting areas like distributed memeory management, routing, topology aggregation. Several papers on clustering (group formation). Papers
Some interesting people who have worked on graph algorithms - symmetry breaking, coloring, network flow, etc. Serge Plotkin , Nathan Linial, Andrew V. Goldberg
Searching the HBP Bibliographies Bibliographies of alot of distributed algorithms work. Can search for various papers. Unfortunately you still have to go to the library to get the paper. Many of the people involved do not have very good web pages.
Self-Stabilization Stabilization of some distributed system from an illegal state (due to faults or message loss) to a legal state in a finite number of steps. Origins in a Djikstra paper (1974). Deals with the design of fault tolerant algorithms and has been applied to problems like token ring, mutual exclusion, synchronisation and communication protocols.