Speaker:

Malcolm MacIver, Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University

Title:

Evolution and mechanisms of planning through the lens of predator-prey dynamics, robotics, and artificial intelligence

Abstract:

The water-to-land transition around 350 million years ago had several notable consequences. One is a 10-fold increase in relative brain size over ancestral water-dwelling vertebrates in prominent lineages. Another, which our own group has shown, is that the amount of space available to vision increases by a factor of one million, mostly due to the higher transparency of air to light compared to water. In this talk, we describe how these factors may be related to the emergence of advanced cognition, specifically the ability to consider actions and their sequential interdependence in relation to the value of an outcome, or “planning.” Through methods of computational ethology and AI, we show that planning garners higher survival rates, but only in select land-based environments (suggesting aquatic animals will rarely if ever evolve planning). We discuss results using autonomous robots and live animals interacting in a mock predator-prey scenario to test computational hypotheses, and initial progress in neural recordings to examine neural implementation details.

Speaker Bio:

Malcolm A. MacIver is a group leader of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems at Northwestern University, where he is Professor with joint appointments between Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, and an additional appointment in the Department of Neurobiology (courtesy). His work focuses on extracting principles underlying animal behavior, focusing on interactions between biomechanics, neuronal processing, evolution and sensory system properties. He then incorporates these principles into advanced biorobotic systems, or large scale simulations on computing clusters, for synergy between technological and scientific advances. For this work he received the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering from President Obama at the White House. MacIver has also developed interactive science-inspired art installations that have exhibited internationally, and frequently consults for science fiction film and TV series makers.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97462977152
Passcode: NICO2023

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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