Michael Levin, Vannevar Bush Professor; Director, Allen Discovery Center at Tufts; Director, Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, Department of Biology, Tufts University; Associate Faculty, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University

Talk title: Robot Cancer: what the bioelectrics of embryogenesis and regeneration can teach us about unconventional computing, cognition, and the software of life

Talk Abstract: Today's engineered robots are often made from reliable yet dumb parts, which greatly limits their adaptive functionality but ensures that their subsystems do not defect from the overall purpose. In contrast, a key aspect of Life is that biological systems have competency at each level - they are made of collectives of cells, tissues, organs, etc. each of which has local goals, which orchestrates the noise and fragility at lower levels towards highly robust system-level behaviors. The cooperation and competition across scales in living systems results in great…