Note the unusual time

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                   B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y
                      Computer Science Department
                          C O L L O Q U I U M
                     Wednesday, October 9, 11:00 AM
                       (Coffee served at 10:45 AM)
                         Seminar Room / MCS 135
 
                  Smart Matter: Frontiers of Computation

                             John R. Gilbert
                         
                    MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
                   and U of California at Santa Barbara

"Smart Matter" is a research theme at PARC, in which the aim is to exploit
trends of miniaturization and integration of both computer hardware and
micromechanical devices to build new kinds of machines and systems.  The
idea is to trade computation (which is getting cheaper very fast) for
physical or mechanical complexity.  The resulting systems typically
integrate sensing, computation, and (sometimes) actuation in a fine-grained
way.

Some of the projects in this space are MEMS and microlasers; an "active
surface" air-jet paper mover; distributed collaborative sensing; and a
modular robot.  I'll talk about a few of these, with a particular focus on
the challenges that this research poses for computer science.

=================
Speaker biography:

John R. Gilbert founded the Computation and Matter Area in the Systems and
Practices Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC)
in 1997, with a charter to connect computer science and information
technology with smart matter and systemic MEMS.  He directed CMA's research
from 1997 until 2002, including projects in distributed data analysis and
collaborating sensors, meso-scale MEMS for active surfaces, and modular
robotics.  He is currently on sabbatical at MIT, and will join the Computer
Science faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2003.

Gilbert received his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford in 1981.  From
1981 to 1988 he was Assistant and Associate Professor of Computer Science
at Cornell, where he was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator.  In 1988
he joined Xerox PARC, where he performed and directed research in parallel
computing, computational geometry, languages and compilers for
high-performance computing, and mathematical algorithms and software.
Gilbert has been a member of the Council of the Society for Industrial and
Applied Mathematics and chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on
Numerical Mathematics.

Host: Shang-Hua Teng

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For colloquium info, including directions, see
http://www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium
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