Smart Matter:  Frontiers of Computation

John R. Gilbert
Palo Alto Research Center and
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

"Smart Matter" is a research theme at PARC, in which we aim to
exploit trends of miniaturization and integration of both
computer hardware and micromechanical devices to build new kinds
of machines and systems.  The idea is to trade computation
(which is getting cheaper very fast) for physical or mechanical
complexity.  The resulting systems typically integrate sensing,
computation, and (sometimes) actuation in a fine-grained way.

Some of the projects we are working on in this space are MEMS and
microlasers; an "active surface" air-jet paper mover; distributed
collaborative sensing; and a modular robot.  I'll talk about a 
few of these, with a particular focus on the challenges that this 
research poses for computer science.

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Short biography:

John R. Gilbert is a Principal Scientist in the Systems and
Practices Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly
Xerox PARC).  He founded PARC's Computation and Matter Area in
1997, with a charter to connect computer science and information 
technology with smart matter and systemic MEMS.  He directed 
CMA's research from 1997 until 2002, including projects in 
distributed data analysis and collaborating sensors, meso-scale 
MEMS for active surfaces, and modular robotics.

Dr. Gilbert received his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford 
in 1981.  From 1981 to 1988 he was Assistant and Associate
Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, where he was an NSF
Presidential Young Investigator.  In 1988 he joined Xerox PARC,
where he has performed and directed research in parallel
computing, computational geometry, languages and compilers for
high-performance computing, and mathematical algorithms and
software.  Dr. Gilbert is a member of the Council of the 
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and a past 
chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Numerical Mathematics.  
Dr. Gilbert developed the sparse matrix solvers used in the
commercial Matlab engineering environment; he is also the author
of about 50 technical papers and a number of patents.  
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