NSF Bio-Inspired Design Workshop: Charting a Course for Computer-Aided Bio-inspired Design Research

Important Dates 7 May Submissions due 11 May Notification of acceptance 5 June 9:00am-12:30pm Workshop

Workshop Aim: Bio-inspired design (BID) or biomimicry is an emerging research area in engineering design, computer science and biology that seeks to systematically mine biological knowledge to solve existing engineering problems.  However, the community of BID researchers at present is fragmented with no professional society, unifying funding source, or recurring conference meeting.  BID design research is active across many disciplines and has had important and significant results. Nevertheless, BID remains largely a research activity contained in universities, not an activity practiced by design engineers in the field.  The research-not-practice status of BID requires approaches to mine biology for solutions to problems for which we have no current “engineered” solution.  For example, biological solutions exhibit superior sustainability to engineered solution.  Similarly, biological solutions are complex both in their solution and the problem they solve.  As the problems solved become more complex, and the engineered solutions themselves also become more complex, perhaps biology offers insight on how to solve the problem. For full details, please see the external website for the workshop.

Workshop Chairs Ashok K. Goel (Georgia Tech) Dan McAdams (Texas A&M) Robert Stone (Oregon State) (rob.stone@oregonstate.edu) Program Committee Li Shu, Univ. of Toronto Satyendra Gupta, Univ. of Maryland Amaresh Chakrabarti, Indian Inst. of Science Janine Benyus, Biomimicry Inst. Julian Vincent, Univ. of Bath Ram Sriram, National Inst. of Standrads and Technology Workshop Notes Workshop External Website

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Workshop format:
The format of the proposed workshop is a half-day meeting focused on bringing together different communities under the single umbrella of BID.  BID, as a general method or theory for design, is in its infancy.  The workshop will lay the framework that allows BID to move from a general concept with point specific applications to a full research field with identified problems, challenges and, perhaps, approaches to deal with those challenges.

Agenda:
Summary of First Workshop: Goel, McAdams and Stone
Short presentations by selected participants
Poster presentations by all interested participants
Breakout sessions
Discussion of research agenda 

Submission Information:
To attend the workshop, we strongly encourage you to prepare a poster of your research interests or projects related to bio-inspired design.  The poster will address ONE of the following topics:
1) Convey the state of your current BID research or, if you are not currently conducting BID research, how you think bio-inspired design may play a role in your future research directions;
2) What BID topic you would tackle with $500,000 of funding over two-three years and how would you go about conducting the research (note, we do not have $500K to distribute :), so this is to show the attending program managers what type of activity a BID research program may generate);
3) An interesting BID research problem that needs to be solved.

Concerning poster logistics, please plan on a space of 24"x42" (portrait orientation).  Multiple sheets of paper to form your poster are acceptable as well.

To apply to the workshop, please email Rob Stone (rob.stone@oregonstate.edu) with your poster topic or, in the event of no poster, a one page statement of your interest in BID.  Prior BID workshop attendees who were accepted to the previously scheduled workshop at DETC in Washington, DC, are automatically accepted to this workshop.

Attendees at the workshop need to register either as an addition to the DCC'12 conference registration at a cost of $25, or if not registered for the conference at a cost of $50. Please go the main DCC12 conference page and then to Registration to register.

Return to DCC12 homepage.