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Talk kindly contributed by Michael Levin in SEMF’s 2022 Spacious Spatiality.

https://semf.org.es/spatiality.

TALK ABSTRACT
Life was solving problems in metabolic, genetic, physiological, and anatomical spaces long before brains and nervous systems appeared. In this talk, I will describe remarkable capabilities of cell groups as they create, repair, and remodel complex anatomies. Anatomical homeostasis reveals that groups of cells are collective intelligences; their cognitive medium is the same as that of the human mind: electrical signals propagating in cell networks. I will explain non-neural bioelectricity and the tools we use to track the basal cognition of cells and tissues and control their function for applications in regenerative medicine. I will conclude with a discussion of our framework based on evolutionary scaling of intelligence by pivoting conserved mechanisms that allow agents, whether designed or evolved, to navigate complex problem spaces.

TALK MATERIALS

Workshop supported by the Imperial College Physics of Life Network of Excellence.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/physics-of-life/

In Part 2 of this thought-provoking conference, we discussed the emergence of order and multicellularity. Besides short talks delivered by esteemed international speakers from the interface of physics and biology, a significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to open discussion. This exciting meeting was supported by the “Physics of Life” Network of Excellence at Imperial College London and the Biological Physics Group of the Institute of Physics (IOP).

Emergence of order [Chair: Chiu Fan Lee]

This educational video about cellular automata was filmed, narrated, and edited by Rudy Rucker in 1990, using some “CA Lab” software he worled on at Autodesk. Renamed “Cellab,” the software and manual are available for free on Rucker’s website.

http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm.

But certainly you can watch the video without using the software. Two-dimensional CA rules discussed include Langton’s worm, the game of Life, Silverman’s Brain, the Vote rule, the Rug rule, gas-simulating rules, and many others.

Cornell University researchers have created an interface that allows users to handwrite and sketch within computer code – a challenge to conventional coding, which typically relies on typing.

The pen-based interface, called Notate, lets users of computational, digital notebooks open drawing canvases and handwrite diagrams within lines of traditional, digitized computer code.

Powered by a deep learning model, the interface bridges handwritten and textual programming contexts: notation in the handwritten diagram can reference textual code and vice versa. For instance, Notate recognizes handwritten programming symbols, like “n”, and then links them up to their typewritten equivalents.

Dr. Svitlana Volkova, Ph.D. (https://www.pnnl.gov/people/svitlana-volkova) is Chief Scientist, Decision Intelligence and Analytics, National Security Directorate, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), which is one of the United States Department of Energy national laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science.

Dr. Volkova is a recognized leader in the field of computational social science and computational linguistics and her scientific contributions and publication profile cover a range of topics on applied machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and social media analytics.

Dr. Volkova’s research focuses on understanding, predicting, and explaining human behavior, interactions, and real-world events from open-source social data and her approaches help advance effective decision making and reasoning about extreme volumes of dynamic, multilingual, multimodal, and diverse real-world unstructured data.

Dr. Volkova has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing, and an M.S. in Computer Science, from Kansas State University.