[lug] BLUG Meeting Announcement 2013-09-12

[Boulder Linux]

    http://lug.boulder.co.us/calendar.html

The September Boulder Linux User Group meeting is coming up.

   Talk : Distributed Information Processing in Materials that Think

Speaker : Nikolaus Correll

   When : 7:15 p.m. on Thu, Sep 12, 2013 

  Where : Applied Trust, 1033 Walnut St, Bulder, CO 80302

          Applied Trust is on Walnut Street in downtown Boulder. It is
          the door just west of Amante Coffee.

    Map : http://lug.boulder.co.us/meetings.html

Parking : Parking on the street is free after 7pm and there are 2 public
          garages on Walnut at $1.25/hour and bike parking on the sidewalk
          in front of the office.

    Bus : Less than 2 blocks from Broadway which is served by the Skip busses.
          Less than 4 blocks from the Boulder Transit Center which serves
          almost all routes.


Summary of 'Distributed Information Processing in Materials that Think'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Materials that think are enabled by recent advances in smart polymers,
desktop manufacturing systems and miniaturization of computers. Materials that
think tightly integrate sensing, actuation, computation and communication in a
periodic, amorphous fashion, which might enable revolutionary new composites
with fully programmable capabilities. The challenges in creating materials that
think lie at the intersection of material science engineering and computer
science, and - from a CS perspective - require advances in distributed
algorithms for signal processing, control and routing of information. I will
illustrate these challenges and recent advances by our group using three case
studies, all using identical computational infrastructure: (1) a soft robotic
skin that can locate and classify textures by locally sampling, processing and
classifying 3kHz vibration signals and route relevant information to a central
processing unit using multi-hop networking. (2) A modular building block for
creating intelligent walls and facade systems that can recognize complex
gestures spanning multiple building blocks in a robust and scalable fashion
using Bloom filter-based multi-cast routing and a simple classifier. And (3)
variable stiffness composites that can assume arbitrary shapes using simple
actuation and local feedback control.


Pre meeting food
----------------

Food will be available at the meeting location, so please show up around 6:45 pm
and join us for a bite to eat. We'll start the meeting about 7:15.


--
Boulder Linux User Group
http://lug.boulder.co.us