Rahmatallah Shoureshi University of Denver
A US-Europe workshop is organized which will address Hierarchical Organization of Biological and Engineering Design and Control of Intelligent Systems, an emerging technology area that would advance engineering and bio, micro, and nano technologies on an integrated platform. The workshop timely follows foot steps of NSF's Workshop on Biosensing and Bioactuation held at University of Maryland in November 2007.
This workshop is scheduled to be held in Italy in May, 2008. It is expected to bring together expertise from US and Europe in: Biology & Bioengineering, Advanced bio-inspired materials, and Nano and Micro Machatronics. Bio-inspired system design needs to benefit from both biological understanding and engineering innovations. The proposed workshop will be a strong interdisciplinary effort that will bridge the gap between science and engineering. This workshop will stimulate diverse domestic and international talents to define a scientific and technological roadmap for biosensing, bioactuation, and bio-inspired systems.
This workshop is jointly supported by NSF (CMMI/ENG & Statistics/MPS) and AFOSR.
Evolved over millions of years, biological systems offer many exquisite examples of intelligent behavior. Many bio-organisms have sensors and actuators vastly superior to the best engineered systems. Through extensive research, we have come to realize and appreciate the fact that nature continues to reveal new and ever more interesting biomaterials that exhibit extreme, unexpected dynamic and multi-functional properties on both the component and system level. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) in collaboration with the European Science Foundation (ESF); organized a workshop focused on BioSensing and BioActuation: Interface of Living and Engineering Systems. The main goals of this workshop were to: create a platform for scientific dissemination; strengthen existing collaborations and stimulate the creation of new prospects; provide consolidate strategic advice for the benefit of the funding agencies, industry, research establishments and academia. This included foresight for research planning, promotion and dissemination of knowledge, standards and best practices and applications of BioSensing and BioActuation. Within the domain of Bio-inspired Engineering, this workshop had its focus on Sensors, Actuators and System. This was chosen to provide an intrinsically multi-disciplinary target for Bio-inspired Engineering that poses significant but not insurmountable scientific and technical challenges, and that offers the promise of leading to transformative technologies in a range of engineering applications. This focus was emerged through a series of workshops organized by ESF, NSF, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). These activities had culminated in two key scientific workshops. The first, organized by NSF in November 2007, brought together 40 US researchers to identify significant Grand Challenges for research under the heading of BioSensing and BioActuation. The second, the present workshop, organized by NSF, AFOSR, and ESF in June 2008, brought together 20 European and 20 US researchers to explore and refine the scientific content of the identified Grand Challenges. Based on different group discussions, the following needs and recommendations for each of the four (4) workshop themes were presented. 1. Sensor Informatics Guided by Life: Understand and emulate data mining and prioritization, as well as decision-making processes, in living organisms to facilitate monitoring, assessment, and control of complex systems in sensor rich environments. 2. Hierarchical Organization of Biology: Determine subtleties underlying the growth of hierarchical bio-structures and bio-systems, and their use in sensing/actuation; apply to new multi-scale and multi-functional sensor/actuator concepts. 3. Spying on Cells: Extracting the Secrets of Cell Function and Response: Monitor living cells in-situ and continuously (over multiple time scales) to understand, characterize, and model functional behavior at the molecular and cellular levels; explore biosensor specificity and flexibility for distinct responses to different combinations of stimuli. 4. Forward Engineering & Design of Biological Components & Systems: Synthesize hybrid mechanical/electronic/living systems through systems-level integration of biological and engineered components that sense, actuate, compute, regenerate and efficiently allocate resources to achieve desired responses and functions. From the activities and discussions that followed this workshop, NSF, AFOSR, and ESF developed new research opportunities which have resulted in several major research grants awarded to teams of researchers in US and Europe. Under the EFRI mechanism at NSF, twelve new research proposals were funded for a total $12M. Under the MURI mechanism at AFOSR, a new research program called Fly-by-Feel was initiated among researchers from Stanford, University of Denver, UCLA, and UBC with a five year $7.5M funding. Under the EUROCORE mechanism, ESF has created a new funding opportunity for the European researchers. Thus, this workshop successfully archived its goals.
