Radhika Nagpal

Last updated
Radhika Nagpal
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forSelf-organising computer systems
AwardsCRA-W Borg Early Career Award (2010) McDonald Mentoring Award (2015)
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Institutions Princeton University Harvard University
Doctoral advisor Gerald Jay Sussman
Website www.radhikanagpal.org

Radhika Nagpal is an Indian-American computer scientist and researcher in the fields of self-organising computer systems, biologically-inspired robotics, and biological multi-agent systems. [1] She is the Augustine Professor in Engineering in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton University. Formerly, she was the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University [2] and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In 2017, Nagpal co-founded a robotics company under the name of Root Robotics. This educational company works to create many different opportunities for those unable to code to learn how. [3]

Contents

Education and academic career

Nagpal received an S.B. and S.M. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2001. Her dissertation, "Programmable Self-Assembly using Biologically-Inspired Local Interactions and Origami Mathematics", was supervised by Gerald Sussman and Harold Abelson. [4] In it, she presented a language for instructing a sheet of identically-programmed agents to self-assemble into a desired shape making use only of local interactions, and in a manner robust to irregularities, communication failure, and agent malfunction.

From 2001 to 2003, she served as a postdoctoral lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, as a member of the Amorphous Computing Group. [3] From 2004 to 2009, she served as an assistant professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; from 2009 to 2012, she served as the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS. [5] From 2012 to 2019, she served as the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS, where she headed the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group. [2] In 2022, she moved her SSR lab to Princeton Robotics with joint appointments between the departments of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the department of computer science.

Academic research

Her research group focuses on biologically-inspired multi-agent systems: collective algorithms, programming paradigms, modular and swarm robotics, and on biological multi-agent systems: models of multicellular morphogenesis, collective insect behavior. [6] This work lies at the intersection of computer science (AI/robotics) and biology. It studies bio-inspired algorithms, programming paradigms, and hardware designs for swarm/modular robotic systems and smart materials, drawing inspiration mainly from social insects and multicellular biology. It also investigates models of self-organization in biology, specifically how cells cooperate during the development of multicellular organisms. [7]

Programming paradigms for robust collective behavior

Her primary research interest is developing programming paradigms for robust collective behavior, inspired by biology. Ultimately, the goal is to create a framework for the design and analysis of self-organising multi-agent systems. Her group's approach is to formalize these strategies as algorithms, analysis, theoretical models, and programming languages. They are especially interested in global-to-local compilation, the ability to specify user goals at the high level and automatically derive provable strategies at the agent level.

Understanding robust collective behavior in biological systems

Another of her research interests is in understanding robust collective behavior in biological systems. Building artificial systems can give us insights into how complex global properties can arise from identically-programmed parts --- for example, how cells can form scale-independent patterns, how large morphological variations can arise from small genetic changes, and how complex cascades of decisions can tolerate variations in timing. She is interested in mathematical and computational models of multi-cellular behavior, that capture hypotheses of cell behavior and cell-cell interactions as multi-agent systems, and can be used to provide insights into systems level behavior that should emerge. Her group works in close collaboration with biologists, and currently studies growth and pattern formation in the fruit fly wing.

Academic positions

Nagpal has held the following positions as a researcher and an academic:

  1. Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ from 1994-1995 as a technical staff member [8]
  2. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Amorphous Computing Group from 2001-2003 as a postdoctoral lecturer [6]
  3. Harvard Medical School from 2003-2004 as a research fellow [8]
  4. Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from 2004-2009 as an assistant professor of Computer Science [8]
  5. Harvard Medical School, Department of Systems Biology since 2004 as an affiliated faculty member [8]
  6. Harvard Wyss Institute for Biological-inspired Engineering since 2008 as a Core Faculty Member [8]
  7. Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from 2009 to 2012 as an associate professor of computer science [8]
  8. Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2012 as the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science [5]

Awards and honors

During her time as Radcliffe Fellow, she worked with experimental biologists to develop a better understanding of collective intelligence in social insects through the application of computer science. [13]

Related Research Articles

Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bionics</span> Application of natural systems to technology

Bionics or biologically inspired engineering is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design engineering systems and modern technology.

Biorobotics is an interdisciplinary science that combines the fields of biomedical engineering, cybernetics, and robotics to develop new technologies that integrate biology with mechanical systems to develop more efficient communication, alter genetic information, and create machines that imitate biological systems.

Microbial intelligence is the intelligence shown by microorganisms. The concept encompasses complex adaptive behavior shown by single cells, and altruistic or cooperative behavior in populations of like or unlike cells mediated by chemical signalling that induces physiological or behavioral changes in cells and influences colony structures.

Alan Mackworth is a professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is known as "The Founding Father" of RoboCup. He is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and former Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence from 2001–2014.

Amorphous computing refers to computational systems that use very large numbers of identical, parallel processors each having limited computational ability and local interactions. The term Amorphous Computing was coined at MIT in 1996 in a paper entitled "Amorphous Computing Manifesto" by Abelson, Knight, Sussman, et al.

Ekaterini Panagiotou Sycara is a Greek computer scientist. She is an Edward Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University internationally known for her research in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of negotiation, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. She directs the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. She also serves as academic advisor for PhD students at both Robotics Institute and Tepper School of Business.

Artificial development, also known as artificial embryogeny or machine intelligence or computational development, is an area of computer science and engineering concerned with computational models motivated by genotype–phenotype mappings in biological systems. Artificial development is often considered a sub-field of evolutionary computation, although the principles of artificial development have also been used within stand-alone computational models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuela M. Veloso</span> Portuguese-American computer scientist

Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.

Natural computing, also called natural computation, is a terminology introduced to encompass three classes of methods: 1) those that take inspiration from nature for the development of novel problem-solving techniques; 2) those that are based on the use of computers to synthesize natural phenomena; and 3) those that employ natural materials to compute. The main fields of research that compose these three branches are artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, fractal geometry, artificial life, DNA computing, and quantum computing, among others.

Robert J. Wood is a roboticist and a professor of electrical engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and is the director of the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory. At Harvard, he directs the NSF-funded RoboBees project, a 5-year project to build a swarm of robotic bees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Artificial life</span> Field of study

Artificial life is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American theoretical biologist, in 1986. In 1987 Langton organized the first conference on the field, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: soft, from software; hard, from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry. Artificial life researchers study traditional biology by trying to recreate aspects of biological phenomena.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joanna Aizenberg</span> American chemist

Joanna Aizenberg is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. She is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the co-director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She is a prominent figure in the field of biologically inspired materials science, having authored 90 publications and holding 25 patents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara J. Grosz</span> American computer scientist (born 1948)

Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE is an American computer scientist and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems. With Alison Simmons, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS programme at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kilobot</span>

The Kilobot is a 3.3 cm tall low-cost swarm robot developed by Radhika Nagpal and Michael Rubenstein at Harvard University. They can act in groups, up to a thousand, to execute commands programmed by users that could not be executed by individual robots. A problem with research on robot collectives is that the cost of individual units is high. The Kilobot's total cost of parts is under $15. In addition to low cost, it has applications such as collective transport, human-swarm interaction, and shape self-assembly.

Swarm robotic platforms apply swarm robotics in multi-robot collaboration. They take inspiration from nature. The main goal is to control a large number of robots to accomplish a common task/problem. Hardware limitation and cost of robot platforms limit current research in swarm robotics to mostly performed by simulation software. On the other hand, simulation of swarm scenarios that needs large numbers of agents is extremely complex and often inaccurate due to poor modelling of external conditions and limitation of computation.

Cell-based models are mathematical models that represent biological cells as discrete entities. Within the field of computational biology they are often simply called agent-based models of which they are a specific application and they are used for simulating the biomechanics of multicellular structures such as tissues. to study the influence of these behaviors on how tissues are organised in time and space. Their main advantage is the easy integration of cell level processes such as cell division, intracellular processes and single-cell variability within a cell population.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Wooldridge (computer scientist)</span>

Michael John Wooldridge is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. His main research interests is in multi-agent systems, and in particular, in the computational theory aspects of rational action in systems composed of multiple self-interested agents. His work is characterised by the use of techniques from computational logic, game theory, and social choice theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carla Gomes</span> Portuguese-American computer scientist

Carla Pedro Gomes is a Portuguese-American computer scientist and professor at Cornell University. She is the founding Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability and is noted for her pioneering work in developing computational methods to address challenges in sustainability. She has conducted research in a variety of areas of artificial intelligence and computer science, including constraint reasoning, mathematical optimization, and randomization techniques for exact search methods, algorithm selection, multi-agent systems, and game theory. Her work in computational sustainability includes ecological conservation, rural resource mapping, and pattern recognition for material science.

Ana Maria Severino de Almeida e Paiva is a full professor at the University of Lisbon. Her work is around artificial intelligence and robotics. She is an elected fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence.

References

  1. "Radhika Nagpal, computer scientist". The Valentina Project. 2014-03-05. Retrieved 2014-08-10.
  2. 1 2 "Radhika Nagpal". Radhika Nagpals Webpage. Retrieved 2023-04-23.
  3. 1 2 "Radhika Nagpals Webpage". Radhika Nagpals Webpage.
  4. Nagpal, Radhika (2001). Programmable Self-Assembly: Constructing Global Shape Using Biologically-Inspired Local Interactions and Origami Mathematics (PhD thesis). MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. hdl:1721.1/7076.
  5. 1 2 "Radhika Nagpal approved for promotion to tenured full professor". April 18, 2012. Retrieved December 20, 2017.
  6. 1 2 "Radhika Nagpals Webpage". Radhika Nagpals Webpage.
  7. "Radhika Nagpal". harvard.edu. Retrieved 6 August 2015.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Radhika Nagpal". www.seas.harvard.edu. 2017-07-14. Retrieved 2017-12-12.
  9. "Computer scientist Radhika Nagpal wins Borg Early Career Award". harvard.edu. Retrieved 6 August 2015.
  10. Gibney, E.; Leford, H.; Lok, C.; Hayden, E.C.; Cowen, R.; Klarreich, E.; Reardon, S.; Padma, T.V.; Cyranoski, D.; Callaway, E. (December 18, 2014). "Nature's 10 Ten people who mattered this year". Nature . 516 (7531): 311–319. doi: 10.1038/516311a . PMID   25519114.
  11. "Radhika Nagpal receives McDonald mentoring award". www.seas.harvard.edu. 2016-02-03. Retrieved 2017-12-12.
  12. "Elected AAAI Fellows". AAAI. Retrieved 2024-01-04.
  13. "From Social Insects to Radcliffe Fellows: Exploring a Collective Intelligence - Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University". harvard.edu. Retrieved 6 August 2015.