MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms is hosting a workshop on
"Avogadro-Scale Engineering," seeking to develop an engineering practice
that is appropriate for the kinds of experimental systems that CBA
researchers are creating that might scale from having 10
3 to 10
23
components (
http://cba.mit.edu/docs/03.06.NSF/).
This follows a meeting ran last year on emergent phenomena in
enormously complex engineered systems (
http://cba.mit.edu/events/02.10.emergent/),
which identified the increasingly urgent need for, and lack of, design
principles that can prescribe as well as describe such behavior. This
meeting will present encouraging progress since then towards answering
these challenging questions.
The two days will be divided between the two core CBA goals of
embodying and abstracting logical functions in physical forms. The first
day, on "form," will explore prospects for programmable universal
error-corrected assembly of perfect macroscopic systems from imperfect
microscopic components, over scales from molecules to buildings. And the
second day, on "function," will consider the operation of such systems
in a "statistical-mechanical" limit that can reliably specify their
global behavior without demanding a detailed description of their
internal configuration, based on algorithm generators such as physical
implementations of generalized graphical message-passing and distributed
solutions to semidefinite programs.
Each day will comprise morning research talks from both CBA researchers
and leading international collaborators in these areas, afternoon
laboratory demonstrations and joint work, ending with wrap-up roadmap
planning for future support of these activities. Attendance at the
meeting requires registration with Susan Murphy-Bottari
<susan@cba.mit.edu>, who can also provide information on the local
logistics.
We look forward to seeing you at MIT,
Isaac Chuang
Neil Gershenfeld
Joseph Jacobson
Scott Manalis
