Distinguished Lecture Series: The Pursuit of Collective Intelligence
to
Location
Phillips Hall 101
Description
Abstract:
In nature, vast colonies of ants, bees, and fish use simple rules of interaction to achieve fascinating forms of
collective intelligence. We can even program robots to behave this way.
But what about our own scientific collective? We too have rules, often implicit, that determine how we interact with
each other and create culture. Are they leading to collective intelligence?
In this talk, I will tell you about a personal experiment to try and identify, publicly articulate, and replace rules, and
in so doing strive to change the culture.
Biography:
Radhika Nagpal is the Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and a core faculty member of
the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She leads the Self-organizing
Systems Research Group (SSR) and her research interests span computer science, robotics, and biology. In
2014, she was named by Nature magazine as one of the top ten influential scientists and engineers of the year
(Nature 10 award, Dec 2014), for her and her group's work on decentralized robot swarms. Radhika is also known
for being the author of a Scientific American blog article on academic life, called "The Awesomest 7-year
Postdoc".
