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Current Research IV

Erik Demaine Daniela Rus Scott Aaronson: April 12, 2011; Running Time: 0:35:38

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Research can be serious fun, as these three scientists demonstrate in wide-ranging presentations encompassing sculpture, robotics and even time travel.

Forget the swan-shaped napkins served up by restaurants. Erik Demaine’s origami involves thousands of folds and a year’s worth of labor, and leaps from art to math and back. In these creations, Demaine finds infinite challenge and engagement. He shows examples of pleated folding in which hyperbolic paraboloids link up, via complex algorithms into intriguing new geometries. Demaine says, “On the scientific side, I want to know what the paper is doing,” so he builds simulations using photographs of real paper, ending up with a virtual model of a physical piece of paper, to generate more paper origami creations. (Demaine’s work, sometimes accomplished in association with his father, resides in collections of the world’s finest art museums.) When Demaine is stuck with a math problem, he “can just build a sculpture to illustrate why the math problem is hard.” He also uses mathematics to figure out how to build a sculpture. He recommends this approach because it offers “the flexibility to jump back and forth between worlds.”

Daniela Rus has been developing an origami free of human labor, where sheets “organize themselves as objects and program their own shapes.” Her ultimate goal is to program various kinds of matter, embedding different materials with actuators, sensors, communication capabilities, and providing the software required for self-shaping processes. She shows a suite of functional objects inspired by origami, including a worm robot made of out of creased patterns, printed three-dimensionally out of a single sheet of paper. Rus has also created smart rocks that are actually a collection of robotic cubes that “talk to each other” and make decisions about how to come together to achieve a desired design, such as a dog. She is aiming for self-assembling robots that might traverse tunnels with snakelike shapes. Rus believes programmable materials will have a great impact on manufacturing. “ Imagine a robot Kinkos of 2020, where you don’t go to print a poster, but to print a robot.”

No origami for Scott Aaronson, but instead deep probing about the limitations of computation, even as technological progress delivers more problem-solving power. He discusses the idea of problems that are simply intractable for computers, and wonders “if there is any feasible way to solve these problems consistent with the laws of physics.” Aaronson envisions hypothetical devices, such as a time travel computer, where in a universe with “closed timelike curves,” nature “would be forced to solve a very hard computational problem” such as going back in time and “telling Shakespeare what plays he was going to write.” Another, less hypothetical concept for solving problems involves quantum computing. Groups today are working on implementing such computers, using ion tracks and nuclear magnetic resonance. However, says Aaronson, quantum computing to date can only “verify that with a high probability, 15 is equal to three times five.” While it is possible “to imagine mathematical computers that vastly exceed” the capability of current technology, enormous challenges remain.

Lecture Details

Location: Kresge Auditorium

About the Speakers

Erik Demaine

Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

Erik D. Demaine pursues wide-ranging research interests, including data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 as a "computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending--moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter". He appears in the recent origami documentary Between the Folds; co-wrote a book about the theory of folding, Geometric Folding Algorithms; and a book about the computational complexity of games, Games, Puzzles, and Computation. His interests span the connections between mathematics and art, particularly sculpture and performance, including curved origami sculptures in the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Daniela Rus

Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Director, Distributed Robotics Laboratory, CSAIL, MIT

Daniela Rus is also the co-director of the CSAIL Center for Robotics, and an associate director of CSAIL. Her research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing, and programmable matter. She has several research activities in environmental robotics. She is the recipient of an NSF Career award and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship. She is a class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, and a fellow of AAAI.

Previously, she was an assistant professor, associate professor, and professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University.

Scott Aaronson

TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

Scott Aaronson is also a member of the Theory of Computation and Complexity Theory groups at MIT. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, and a GED (General Equivalency Diploma) from New York State.

Before coming to MIT, Aaronson worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Aaronson has received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and was a 2009 Sloan Foundation Fellow.

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